New Vision and Progressive Christianity

 New Vision is a Progressive church. That doesn’t mean that you must be progressive to be a member here. It mainly means that your pastor and several members are, so the sermon, readings, and music express that view.

What is Progressive Christianity?

The heart of progressive Christianity is compassion, hospitality, and a posture of welcoming the outsider, behavior modeled by Jesus.

- It is not based on creeds, dogmas, or even beliefs. Rather, we try to follow in the way of Rabbi/Teacher Jesus.

- We promote an understanding of Christian practice and teaching that leads to a greater concern for the way people treat each other than for the way people express their beliefs.

- We respect other religious traditions.

- We read the bible metaphorically rather than literally.

- We are more interested in questions than in answers.

- We are inclusive of everyone, including those of all races, cultures, and nationalities; those of all sexual orientations and all gender identities and expressions; and those of all classes and abilities.

Some of the ways Progressive Christianity is different from Fundamentalist Christianity:

- We don’t accept the concept of a substitutional sacrifice for the atonement of sins (that humans are innately bad, so God sent Jesus to die in our place).

- We are interested in justice and equality and the common good over personal salvation.

- We see Jesus’ life and teachings as a path rather than a belief system.

- We foster love rather than fear, connection rather than division.

- We don’t use the bible to judge anyone.

For more information, go to the website Progressivechristianity.org

The book Saving Jesus from the Church, by Robin Meyers, which was our first book club book, is a great introduction to Progressive Christianity.

Jesus Walks on Water - Sermon for week ending May 8, 2021

Gospel Reading 

 John 6: 16-21

When evening came, Jesus’ disciples went down to the lake. They got into a boat and were crossing the lake to Capernaum. It was already getting dark, and Jesus hadn’t come to them yet. The water was getting rough because a strong wind was blowing. When the wind had driven them out for about three or four miles, they saw Jesus walking on the water. He was approaching the boat and they were afraid. He said to them, “Don’t be afraid.” They wanted to take him into the boat, and then, the boat reached the land where they had been heading.

Sermon

We are finishing our series on the signs and wonders of Jesus in the gospel of John  with, as we heard in the reading, Jesus walking on the water, using Doug Pagitt’s book, Outdoing Jesus. As we have seen, Pagitt reads the miracle stories as many of us do, not as breaking the laws of physics but as breaking open human hearts and human potential. Throughout, he compares the gospel of John to the book of Genesis. He compares this story to the creation story, which also uses imagery of the water and seas as “places of brooding darkness and chaos.” But into this, God brought new life. Unlike some other religions’ creation stories, ours doesn’t call people to live in fear of but in partnership with the earth and the sea. To care for and engage with them. Both the Genesis and the John stories let us know that we can set aside whatever fears, superstitions, and inhibitions we have about the water, the deep, the dark, and the chaos. Because there is also life there. I think the story in John has parallels to our experiences during the pandemic, so these verses have comfort to offer us, too, in our anxiety and inhibitions about coming back out into what has been a frightening, chaotic world. If we look at John’s story as being about how humans benefit from Jesus’ actions, we can see ourselves and all of humanity in the disciples. When the story begins, the text says, “It was evening. It was already getting dark, and the disciples got into a boat to cross the lake.” In a boat, on a lake, as its getting dark is not where anyone wants to be. One of the scariest times in my life was when my family was out on a boat, a motorboat, on lake Burton up in the North Georgia Mountains, when I was 10 years old, and just as it got dark, and it was drizzling, my father decided to take us to see the dam. The deepest part of the lake, with the choppiest waters. He liked to show off how brave he was, and he got way to close to the edge, in my opinion, and I was sure we were all going over. My brother and I spent our teenage years in that boat on that lake, but we never got anywhere near that dam. Also, a lot of people are just afraid of the dark. Almost all kids are. And 40 % of adults. Because we can’t see what’s out there. It’s unknown. We don’t have any control over it. Next in the story, we read, “Jesus hadn’t come to them yet.” So they were without their leader, the one they counted on to make them feel safe and secure, which  increased their uncertainty and fear. Then, “the water started getting rough because a strong wind was blowing.” The boat was now being driven by the wind. It wasn’t any longer on its path. They were 3 or 4 miles from shore, at the mercy of the waves. I imagine that’s when full-blown panic set in. And then they saw Jesus walking on the water. He was not being blown about.  He was the opposite of what was happening to them. After a little while, they felt comforted and cared for and safe. He didn’t even get in the boat. Next thing they knew, they had gotten to shore safely. Jesus’ empathy for them and his calm  made it possible for them to get to the other side. This, Pagitt says, was the miracle: “Not some empty demonstration of power or spectacle by Jesus.” But “The calming of fear and getting to the place you were headed even in the midst of the storms you can’t control,” which does parallel our story for the past 14 months. When the pandemic first started, it was strange and scary, but we thought it would only last awhile and be gone. We were gonna get in the boat and row to the other side.  But as it went on and on, we felt stretched way beyond our comfort and safety zones. As the world began to shut down, we were blown off course. Many of us went into survival mode,  buying up all the bottled water and toilet paper. Some of us were afraid to leave our homes. Nightfall brought pictures of bodies stacked on top of one another, and stories doctors and nurses dying while treating Covid patients. We didn’t have leaders to comfort us. We got conflicting and false information. We worried about our families, whom we couldn’t get to. Some of us lost family members. People lost their jobs and their homes and there was no more childcare for workers who had to go in. We felt rudderless.  It was traumatizing. For most of us, the vaccine was the greatest gift ever, but for others, there is anxiety about getting it. It has been a lot. And it still is.  But we can help each other get to the other side because we care about each other. I am looking forward to getting back together in person. To seeing your faces and seeing and hearing Jane play. It is not going to be perfect, but we will get there with the comfort and support of one another. Empathy is the antidote to fear. When the disciples first saw Jesus, they wanted to take him into the boat, not just because they were afraid for themselves, but because they were afraid for him. They had empathy for him and wanted to comfort him. As we begin this journey forward together, let’s follow that example. Let’s start making concrete plans] to expand our mission of comfort and care and empathy for all our neighbors who wear the face of Jesus even further, so that we can make it to the other side, to  this new life, together.

 

Jesus Heals A Blind Man - Sermon for Week ending May 1, 2021

Gospel Reading

John 9: 1-7   The Message

Walking down the street, Jesus saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked, “Rabbi, who sinned: this man or his parents, causing him to be born blind?” Jesus said, “You’re asking the wrong question. You’re looking for someone to blame. There is no such cause-effect here. Look instead for what God can do. We need to be energetically at work for the One who sent me here, working while the sun shines. When night falls, the workday is over. For as long as I am in the world, there is plenty of light. I am the world’s Light.”  He said this and then spit in the dust, made a clay paste with the saliva, rubbed the paste on the blind man’s eyes, and said, “Go, wash at the Pool of Siloam” (Siloam means “Sent”). The man went and washed—and saw.

Sermon

We are continuing this week looking at some of the miracles of Jesus, called signs and wonders in the Gospel of John, using the book Outdoing Jesus by Doug Pagitt, pastor of Solomon’s porch in Minneapolis, a church that focuses on addressing human needs in the community. The title comes from Jesus’ statement to the disciples at the last supper that they will do even greater works than he has done. Pagitt reads these miracles as many of us do, not as breaking the laws of physics, but breaking open human hearts and human potential, and he recounts ways that everyday people are doing the same. As I said last week, John is my least favorite gospel primarily because of its negative portrayal or all Jews who didn’t believe that Jesus was the Messiah, shown through his constant use of “The Jews” as a pejorative, which as we discussed in our book club this week, always becomes a problem when we separate people into a binary of ‘all in’ or ‘’all out,” when humans are much more complex than that. The miracle stories, though, if we read them as humans helping humans, can stand on their own, so I just skip the parts of John’s commentary that I don’t like. As we heard in the reading, this week’s miracle is when Jesus healed a man born blind. The man is sitting where he always sits, beside the busy street that goes to and from the temple. He knows that it is considered a good deed for religious people to give to the needy, so this is a great spot for him to sit with his bowl as they return from the temple with full and generous hearts. As Jesus and his disciples walk by, they see him, and one of them, in his arrogance and self-centeredness, instead of having empathy for the man, or even acknowledging him, uses his predicament for his own education, asking, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, causing him to be born blind?” This belief, that children pay the consequences of what their parents did, was held by many ancient religions, including Judaism, as we read in Exodus 20, verse 5, where Yahweh says, “I am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and the fourth generation.” It’s also the main tenet in the fundamentalist Christian doctrine of original sin, first voiced by Augustine, using the writings of Paul, that says, since Adam and Eve, the first humans, sinned, all of humanity is born in sin. But Jesus says, it has nothing to do with sin. There is no one to blame for his blindness. Let’s focus on what we can do to help. Then he makes a mud paste out of dust and his own saliva and gently applies it to the man’s eyes. Saliva was thought to have medicinal qualities. (My mother sure believed it did.) The dust is literally dust and a reference to Genesis, which says, “Then God formed man from the dust of the ground.” So Jesus is not only giving the man sight. He is giving him a new life, which is what always happens with Jesus’ healings. They are a double blessing of physical healing and being restored to their proper place in the community.  He is no longer an outcast. Pagitt emphasizes that this is also a story about touch. Like Jesus washing the feet of the disciples at the last supper, Jesus connects with this man through human touch. That is a lesson for all of us in how to connect with another’s humanity. I think not being able to touch each other Is one of the harshest things the pandemic has done to us. The man Jesus healed wasn’t the only blind person in the story. The disciples were blinded by their biases. They were sure that someone’s sin caused the man to be born blind. That’s what they had been taught, and they didn’t think to question it. They were also blinded by the sense of superiority they felt over this man because they had physical sight when he didn’t. Throughout the gospels, Jesus opened their eyes to their prejudices and gave them new perspectives and understanding of their fellow humans. In many of my sermons this past year and especially in our New Vision book club, we have been striving to enlighten ourselves about our own biases and long-held stereotypes, admitting that we all have beliefs that we have rarely questioned. And we are giving each other a safe, supportive space to do that now.  In the book White Too Long, The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity, we gained insight into racism in the Christian church, not just in the past, but in the present. For example, the author cites a recent poll that shows 83 percent of white Christians say that confederate monuments are more a symbol of southern pride than of racism. I thought about all the white supremacists who stormed the capitol, destroying property, threatening and even taking lives, while wrapped in confederate flags and carrying crosses. Will they ever question their beliefs or actions. I hope so. Otherwise, we will never get anywhere near unity as a country. The book Caste helped us see that there is a whole system that stigmatizes those deemed inferior to justify their discrimination, like we saw in the way society treated the blind man and we see every day in America. And the book we just finished, Think Again, reiterated the importance of unlearning our biases and stereotypes, rethinking our long-held views, and freeing ourselves to see with new eyes. There is always more to learn, more insight to be gained. And, thankfully, God is still speaking. There is healing paste for us, in books and podcasts and conversations, to continue to open our eyes to new ways of understanding and connecting to all our fellow humans.

Water Into Wine - Sermon for Week Ending April 24, 2021

Reading: 

John 2: 1-10

On the third day there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there. Jesus and his disciples had also been invited to the wedding. When the wine gave out, the mother of Jesus said to him, “They have no wine.” And Jesus said to her, “What concern is that to you and to me?” His mother said to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you.” Now standing there were six stone water jars for the Jewish rites of purification, each holding twenty or thirty gallons. Jesus said to them, “Fill the jars with water.” And they filled them up to the brim. He said to them, “Now draw some out, and take it to the chief steward.” So they took it. When the steward tasted the water that had become wine, and did not know where it came from (though the servants who had drawn the water knew), the steward called the bridegroom and said to him, “Everyone serves the good wine first, and then the inferior wine after the guests have become drunk. But you have kept the good wine until now.” 

Sermon: 

If you have been at New Vision for a while, you know that the gospel of John is my least favorite gospel. Unlike the synoptics, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, that tell the stories of the human Rabbi Jesus, the 4^th gospel mostly portrays him, a lot of the time, as a sort of cosmic super Christ, which is not how I see him. But even worse than that, to me, is John’s anti-Jewish bias, made obvious in his negative portrayal of all Jewish people who did not believe that Jesus was the Messiah, through his continued use of “The Jews” as a pejorative. When I bought this book a couple of years ago, Outdoing Jesus by Doug Pagitt, a progressive Christian writer, after reading a synopsis, I didn’t realize it was just about the gospel of John. So I put it away until recently, and I discovered that it makes some really good points. The author looks at the miracles of Jesus, called signs and wonders in the gospel of John, not as breaking the laws of physics,  but breaking open human hearts, which is also the way I view them. The title comes from John 14: 12, where, during the last supper, Jesus tells the disciples, “You will do the same works that I do. In fact, you will do greater works than I do.” So I thought I would use it as a jumping off point to look at some of these signs and wonders as good deeds for fellow humans. The story for today, as we heard in the reading, is when Jesus changed the water into wine. Of course if you grew up Southern Baptist, Jesus changed it into unfermented wine or grape juice because drinking alcohol was a sin. This story isn’t about a cosmic super Christ. It’s about Jesus at a wedding with his mom. She was the first to notice that the wine was running low. And she told Jesus to do something about it. And after a little reluctance, he did, but not in front of the crowd like you would think a miraculous sign would have been done. The only folks who knew that it happened, Jesus, his mom, the disciples, and the servants, didn’t announce it to the wedding guests. Because Jesus did it for the guests, for the bride, and especially for the groom and his family, who were considered the hosts. Weddings in first century Palestine were multi-day affairs. The first two days were celebration days where the families met and got to know each other. The third day was when the vows were spoken, making it the most important day. And this, the text says, was the third day. They were about to run out of wine on the most important day, and because of customary hospitality expectations, this would have brought great shame to the groom in this honor and shame society. Pagitt says, “Turning the water into wine is not used to enhance Jesus’s reputation. It is used to save the reputation of the groom.”   We too live in an honor and shame society, although it’s not so obvious. People still ask what the rape victim was wearing, and get impatient at the person in the grocery line who is using food stamps. I’ve seen it my whole life in how we shame our homeless neighbors. Our actions and reactions make them ashamed of how they look and how they smell. Ashamed that they don’t have a home to go to and a bed to sleep in. That sometimes the only bathroom is a dumpster. Society blames them for their situation. But not everybody. I read this past week about a barber who has been giving free haircuts to homeless people for 5 years. He said that so many of them never have any human contact, and when he cuts and dries their hair and give them a head massage, he is honoring them. With the fresh haircut, they see themselves differently, and other people see them differently and so treat them differently. That’s what we did at the drop-in center, treated our homeless neighbors as equals. Tried to give them their dignity back. And some of us are still doing it on their own. I love to read Brenda’s updates about the community that forms around the picnic tables when she brings the snack bags.  Another thing about the story that Pagitt points out are the jugs Jesus used. The text says they were meant only for ritual purification. I believe that the gospel writer included this to further disparage Judaism and it’s practices, that the jars would have been made impure after they were used for such a non-religious purpose, and that Jesus was making a statement about how ridiculous that was. But I got a different message from it, which fits with something I have been thinking about for a while, as my theology has evolved to the point that it has been almost total replaced by ethics. The jars were considered sacred. The wedding was considered secular. I think those concepts are archaic and we should stop using them together. Sacred/secular. How self-righteous. Like what we do in church is so different from what goes on in the rest of the world. And so much better. It’s just not true. At New Vision, our music comes from Broadway Musicals, the 60’s, pop, Motown. We don’t change the words to make them about Jesus. The message is already there. And when we do Movies with a Message, we don’t then have to relate them to the bible. The message is already there. Do the right thing. Love your neighbor. Fight against injustice. Finally, since Thursday was Earth Day, I want to mention something in the story that we all know. They had to have wine because no water was drinkable. The only way to make it drinkable, so that people could survive, was through boiling, fermenting, or distilling, which is why wine and other alcohol were the primary source of drinkable liquid up to the 18^th century. I remind us of that because today, over 2 billion people across the world still don’t have access to drinkable water. But thanks to humans helping other humans, there are now programs on the continent of Africa that turn sea water and dew into drinkable water, which not only keeps people alive, but also  benefits women and girls who typically spend their days collecting water from polluted rivers and boiling it. Now they can go to school. No matter how the stories of Jesus were told or interpreted, it seems obvious to me that everything he did was to benefit someone else, and he made his world a better place.  May we follow his example in everything that we do, so that we can help make our world a better place.

 

Acts and the Kindom of Heaven - Sermon for week ending April 17, 2021

Scripture Reading: 

Acts 8: 26-40 (The Message)      

 An angel spoke to Philip: “At noon today I want you to walk over to that desolate road that goes from Jerusalem down to Gaza.” He got up and went. He met an Ethiopian eunuch coming down the road. The eunuch had been on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and was returning to Ethiopia. He was in a chariot, reading the prophet Isaiah.

 Philip heard the eunuch reading Isaiah and asked, “Do you understand what you’re reading?” He answered, “How can I without some help?” and invited Philip into the chariot with him. The passage he was reading was this:

As a sheep led to slaughter,
   and quiet as a lamb being sheared,
He was silent, saying nothing.
    He was mocked and put down, never got a fair trial.
But who now can count his kin
    since he’s been taken from the earth?

 The eunuch said, “Tell me, who is the prophet talking about: himself or some other?”  Using this passage as his text, Phillip told him about Jesus.

As they continued down the road, they came to a stream of water. The eunuch said, “Here’s water. Can I be baptized?” He ordered the chariot to stop. They both went down to the water, and Philip baptized him on the spot. When they came up out of the water, the Spirit of God suddenly took Philip off, and that was the last the eunuch saw of him. He went on down the road as happy as he could be.

 Philip continued north, preaching the message in all the villages along that route until he arrived at Caesarea.

Sermon: 

I thought that the book of Acts which portrays the earliest Christian community as a model of what Jesus taught the disciples about the kindom of heaven and demonstrated throughout the gospels deserved one more sermon. As you probably know, Acts was written by the same person who wrote the gospel of Luke, and it is sort of a narrative sequel, showing how the apostles continued the mission that they all started together. It wasn’t perfect. The best ideas, in the hands of naturally self-centered and greedy humans, can get messy. But they tried. The very beginning of Acts shows the point where they went from being disciples to apostles. As they are watching Jesus leave the earth, someone, perhaps an angel said, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven?”  Jesus had already taught them what they needed to know. It was time for them to stop looking toward him and start looking outward. His spirit was with them. It was time for them to be Jesus to the world. To join together as a community of faith, to heal the sick and feed the hungry and care for the marginalized and the outcast. To spread the good news that everyone is loved, and everyone is included in the kindom of heaven. And they did. We saw last week how in this new community, no one claimed private ownership of anything, but everything was held in common and distributed to each as they had need. That came from Rabbi Jesus’ interpretation of Jubilee from the book of Leviticus, which the biblical prophets also used to denounce the nation when the rich grew richer while the poor grew poorer. And it’s also why Jesus told them in the Sermon on the Mount that they didn’t have to worry about what to eat or drink or wear, because everyone would always have what they needed. In chapter 6, So many hungry people joined the community that the apostles became overwhelmed and sometimes missed folks when distributing food. So they called everyone together, and as a group, they selected 7 people of good standing and wisdom and consecrated them to be in charge of the daily distribution of food. The first deacons. But as this idealistic community developed into the early church, it got a lot more complicated. What began as a group of followers of Jesus of Nazarethstarted to split into Jews who believed Jesus was the Messiah and Jews who didn’t. There were also gentiles or pagans and God worshippers or God fearers, pagans who rejected their Gods, embraced Jewish monotheism and had different levels of commitment to Judaism.  And there were arguments over whether these people had to be circumcised or just profess that Jesus was the messiah. Arguments about who was in and who was out that continue to this day. But to me, the story of the Ethiopian Eunuch clearly shows that no one is excluded from the kindom of heaven. Everyone is included. And that is one of Jesus’ primary teachings. The eunuch was a foreigner and a sojourner. We know that the Israelites were in constant tension with foreign nations, yet the Old Testament is filled with verses telling them to welcome the foreigner and the sojourner travelling through their land. Jesus reiterates this in the parable of the sheep and the goats. But the reality was, foreigners in Jewish lands were outsiders: geographically, ethnically, and socially. Eunuch could mean different things. Usually, it was a surgically altered male, the surgery done before puberty, so that he likely looked more female than male. Or he might have been born that way.

And in a statement made by Jesus in Matthew, It seems it could also refer to someone who has chosen to remain celibate. Whatever the particulars were, eunuchs had no family, so in the familial and patriarchal structure of the time, they were marginalized. Under ancient Jewish law, they could not participate in temple rituals or be permitted into the community. But the prophet Isaiah says that eunuchs who keep God’s covenant will be honored, admitted to the temple, and their sacrifices accepted. In the Wisdom of Solomon, part of the apocrypha, they are given special favor, including a place in the temple. We see in Matthew 19:12 that Rabbi Jesus is inclusive of eunuchs. And in this passage in Acts, we witness their inclusion in the early Christian community. It was Open and Affirming. Phillip doesn’t reject the Ethiopian eunuch because he is an outsider or because he is different. Like the prophets Elijah and Elisha, he reaches out to him and offers assistance. He doesn’t require any conditions for his baptism. He doesn’t talk to him about moral standards. He welcomes him. He affirms him. He declares him a child of God and a beloved member of the kindom of heaven. This lesson of inclusion is a reminder for us, in a world where Asian Americans are being attacked and killed and black Americans are gunned down by the very people who are supposed to protect them. Where brown children are still in cages and transgender children are banned from participating in sports for no reason except prejudice. Where churches still exclude people who don’t measure up to their moral standards. And the Pope, who we thought was more progressive than his predecessors, just last month said that priests cannot bless same sex unions because “God cannot bless sin.” Where in our own liberal, progressive denomination, only 1500 of the 4800 churches are open and affirming. There is more work for us to do to ensure that all God’s children are included and affirmed and cared for equally. May we not rest until we have done our very best to fulfill these words of Jesus: “Truly I tell you, just as you did this to one of these, who are members of my family, you did it to me .”

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Koinonia - Sermon for week ending April 10, 2021

Gospel Reading: 

Acts 4: 32-35
The whole group were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common. With great power, the apostles gave their testimony to the resurrection of Jesus, and great grace was upon them all. There was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned land or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold. They laid it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need.

Sermon: 

Our reading from Acts is one of the lectionary texts for the first Sunday after Easter, as it shows the disciples who were so afraid that they abandoned Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, finally finding their courage and continuing the mission that they all started together. Now apostles, they formed what we refer to as the first Christian community, made up of the followers of Jesus of Nazareth, probably all Jews at first, but not for long, as we soon see the baptisms of an Ethiopian eunuch and a Roman centurion. The apostles tried to model their new community on Jesus’ teachings about the Kindom of Heaven. These verses in chapter 4 are actually first found in chapter 2, which says: “They would sell their possessions and distribute the proceeds to all as any had need. They spent time together, broke bread and ate with glad and generous hearts.” The Greek word for this kind of communal living, shared possessions, and fellowship is koinonia. Koinonia is more than that, though. It’s togetherness, acceptance, interdependence, equality, encouragement, service, and radical hospitality. No good deed goes unpunished, though. The apostles were arrested several times because they were getting more and more followers, which, like Jesus and his followers, was a threat to the Empire, but also like Jesus, they kept going, kept spreading the good news, and some of them paid with their lives. We know that Jews and Christians eventually split, likely based more on practices than beliefs, but I like to think that for a little while, at least, there was something close to Jesus’ kindom of heaven on earth. In the late 60’s and early 70’s some of my fellow Jesus freaks joined communes that tried to follow the same principles we see in the earliest Christian community. I don’t know if they were successful or not. But there is one group that started much earlier, and is still around. You might know more about them than I do. Koinonia Farm, just outside Americus, Georgia. It was founded in 1942 by Clarence Jordan. After graduating from the University of Georgia with an agricultural degree and a mission to improve farming techniques for underprivileged farmers and sharecroppers. Then he got his PhD in Greek New Testament from Southern Baptist Seminary. He was influenced by the early progressive pastor and writer Walter Rauschenbusch, who said that faith was as much or more about the kingdom of heaven than it was about being saved or born again and that Jesus preached about this kingdom much more than he did about a personal relationship with God  (and that was in 1917). Inspired by this social gospel, which was inspired by the community described in the book of Acts, Jordan joined with a few others, bought 400 acres in Sumter County and started a farm based on this model, where “those formerly poor and formerly rich worked together hand in hand as equals, black and white families worked together as if part of the same family farm, and the principles of the kingdom were the guiding light for how the community functioned. Sharing all things in common, this community would be a strong and powerful witness to how the gospel of reconciliation would tear down the intense racial divide and systemic bigotries in this part of the Jim Crow South.” But like the Roman Empire, the Jim Crow Empire was very powerful. In 1956, after Brown vs the Board of Education threatened Jim Crow, Koinonia’s interracial summer camp was shut down by the health department, a boycott of all the products the farm sold was called, and a campaign of intimidation, which included violence, began. White Sumter county citizens started driving past at night, firing guns indiscriminately. They burned crosses on their property and dynamited their farm equipment and roadside stands. In 1957, an 80-car motorcade of Klan members visited Koinonia and told them to leave the state. When Dorothy Day from the Catholic Worker Movement came to sit night watch, someone drove by and fired a shot gun into her car. But, like Jesus and the apostles, they kept going. They kept living the message. To circumvent the boycott, they started a nationwide mail-order business, shipping pecans and peanuts to sympathetic customers across the country. That kept them afloat, but they still struggled. And their membership dwindled, which is what the white citizens of Sumter county wanted. Help arrived in what could have been one of Jesus’ parables.  In 1963, Millard Fuller, a lawyer, businessman, and millionaire from Alabama, and his wife Linda, who were having a spiritual and a marital crisis, gave away everything they owned and moved to Koinonia with their children. Fuller found a mentor and partner in Clarence Jordan, and both believing the words from the bible that land and property should be available to all those in need, they began building houses for poor people in Sumter County. After 10 years, the Fullers left to establish a similar housing program in Africa, and in 1976, with the support and backing of the Koinonia members, Habitat for Humanity international was established. Koinonia has gone through many changes in its 79 years.  It became a non-profit in 1993. But in 2005 it returned to its original form of communal living. And it is still going. Its present mission statement is “to live an intentional, common life together, modeled after the description of the early church in the Acts of the Apostles. While we might not be able to live in a physical covenantal community of fellowship, shared possessions and shared meals, we can strive always to live by its principles:  togetherness, acceptance, interdependence, equality, encouragement, service, and radical hospitality.

 

Easter 2021 - Sermon for week ending April 3, 2021

Reading: 

Our reading is from John 20: 1—16.

Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed. She ran and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple whom Jesus loved and said to them, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.” Then Peter and the other disciple set out and went towards the tomb. Simon Peter went into the tomb and saw the linen wrapping lying there, and the cloth that had been on Jesus’ head.

Mary stood weeping outside the tomb. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb; and she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had been lying, one at the head and the other at the feet. They said to her, “Why are you weeping?” She said to them, “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.” When she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus said to her, “Why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?” Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.” Jesus said to her, “Mary!” She turned and said to him in Hebrew, “Rabbouni!” (which means Teacher). 

Sermon: 

There are so many themes relevant to our lives in the stories of holy week and Easter, so many lessons that Jesus taught us through his actions that week. One of the main ones is courage; courage to risk our very lives to do what is right. Jesus was a threat to the Roman Empire when he first entered the city of Jerusalem and was hailed as a hero by the crowds, while Pilate and his army were entering through another gate as a demonstration of Roman Power over the Jews. Herod had already had John the Baptizer killed because he feared a rebellion. Yet, Jesus rode straight into that fire. Even before that, Jesus had said, “If any want to become my followers, let them take up my cross and follow me.” “To take up the cross,” Amy-Jill Levine tells us, “meant to risk Roman capital punishment. To accept humiliation and loss, even death, in order to proclaim a vision of a better world, a kindom of heaven, and then to work for it.” The incident at the temple was extremely risky because so many people witnessed it, including the temple police and the Roman guards, who likely reported it to Pilate. Unlike what I learned growing up, Jesus didn’t turn over the tables of the money changers to show how corrupt the Jews of his day were. He was one of the Jews of his day. He did it to point out what the mix of church and state and human greed can lead to. It was a public disruption of business to try and get people to understand what was and what wasn’t part of this better world he wanted for them. It’s sort of like blocking the freeway with protests. It makes you unpopular, but sometimes it’s the only way to bring attention to your cause, so it’s a risk you take. The theme of empire is portrayed in the power that the Romans had over their subjects, including economic and political oppression and execution if they felt their power was threatened. In Judas’ betrayal, we saw how greed can lead someone to commit despicable acts. Love across social and political boundaries is evident when the woman from the street entered the house where Jesus was having dinner, poured perfume on his head and feet and washed him. While the host and the other guests expressed righteous indignation, Jesus was grateful and showed her compassion. A powerful theme is the acknowledgment by Jesus of his grief and pain, in the garden of Gethsemane, where he went to pray after sharing the Passover supper with his disciples. Jesus knew his time was short. He had been hearing the rumblings all week. The more he spoke out, the more followers he gained, the bigger threat he was to the Roman Empire. The text said he was grieved and agitated. He shared his feelings with Peter and James and John, and asked them to please stay awake with him, even though it was late. He admitted in his prayer that he didn’t want to face execution. And the disciples didn’t stay awake to talk with him. Then his friend pointed him out to the authorities, and everybody else ran away to save themselves, which brought him more grief and pain. But that leads to the lesson of forgiveness, which is a major tenet of the kindom of heaven. As hurt and disappointed as he was, Jesus forgave them all. Because there is no way to have a community of love and compassion without forgiveness. It’s also one of the most difficult things for humans to do. Evolution has programmed us not to let ourselves be exploited, so we are always on the lookout for it, and when it does happen, it is easy to close that person off forever. Participants in 12 step programs are asked to pray for and wish good things for those who have hurt them.  But this is in tandem with taking an honest look at themselves and accepting that we are all imperfect humans who make mistakes.  

We get angry or afraid or jealous or we don’t feel seen or heard and we say the wrong thing or do the wrong thing. And the only way we can back our peace of mind and peace of heart, is to forgive each other. The primary theme of Easter is Hope. Whether you read the story of the resurrection literally or metaphorically, Jesus’ mission and message did not die when he did. Those same disciples who were so afraid that they abandoned him in the garden somehow found the courage to carry on the work. Maybe knowing that he forgave them set them free. They became teachers with followers of their own, and continued to spread the good news about the kindom of heaven, that was available here on earth if we just love our neighbors as ourselves. And that gives us hope for our world, also a world of unfairness and inequity, where the power of empire arrests a black congresswoman for knocking on a white governor’s office door while he was signing a law making it illegal to give water to people waiting in line to vote. We need hope. And we need to be willing to take even a fraction of the risk that Jesus did to help make hope happen.  And to follow his teachings so that we too can be resurrected from our tombs of hatred and prejudice and self-interest. To free ourselves and everyone else from attitudes and actions that are keeping us from living the kindom life that Jesus wanted for us.

Palm Sunday - sermon for Week Ending March 27, 2021

Reading: 

Matthew 21: 1-11.                 

When they had come near Jerusalem and had reached Bethphage, at the Mount of Olives, Jesus sent two disciples, saying to them, “Go into the village ahead of you, and immediately you will find a donkey colt tied. Untie him and bring him to me. If anyone says anything to you, just say this, ‘The teacher needs it.’” This took place to fulfill what had been spoken through the prophet, saying, “Tell the daughter of Zion, Look, your king is coming to you, humble, and mounted on a donkey.” The disciples went and did as Jesus had directed them; they brought the donkey and put their cloaks on it, and Jesus sat on it. A very large crowd spread their cloaks on the road, and others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road. The crowds that went ahead of him and that followed were shouting, “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest heaven!” When he entered Jerusalem, the whole city was in turmoil, asking, “Who is this?” The crowds were saying, “This is the prophet Jesus from Nazareth in Galilee.”

Sermon

One of the many things I love about New Vision is that we don’t check our brains at the door. We are always interested in exploring new ways to experience the mystery that we call God and new ways to read and interpret the stories in the bible. And much of the time, that means letting go of the interpretations we grew up with. Growing up, I was taught that just about everything that happened in the Old Testament was really a prophecy about Jesus, who would come to save the Jews from themselves, because they had gotten it all wrong, but they rejected him because he wasn’t what they thought he would be. He was too Christian for them or something. I know now, because I use my brain and read books, that the Hebrew Scriptures are about liberation from slavery, exile and return, covenant, and how we are supposed to treat each other. And that the gospels were written by Jews for Jews as communal memory, influenced by the Hebrew Scriptures, first century rabbinic Judaism, and oral stories about Jesus. And Jews during that time were a diverse group who had many choices. They could be Pharisees or Essenes or Sadducees, or become followers of John the Baptizer or Jesus of Nazareth. A few months ago, we looked at the Sermon on the Mount as the Rabbi Jesus’ interpretation of Torah, with the help of Jewish and New Testament scholar Amy-Jill Levine and I found her work so insightful that I bought the Jewish Annotated New Testament by Levine and Marc Brettler. I thought it would be interesting to use it for Palm Sunday, the beginning of Holy Week, which is often read by Christians as anti-Jew, with the Jews labeled as Christ killers, as it was written, portraying Jesus in the tradition of the biblical prophets, who also brought good news to the people. The end of the passage even says, “This is Jesus the prophet from Nazareth in Galilee.” From the beginning, it is Israel’s history that tells us what is going on and why when Jesus enters Jerusalem. The city is holy now as it was then. It’s the capital of Judea and the site of the temple. It’s Passover, the feast of freedom described in the book of Exodus that every Jew celebrated. Tens of thousands of people from the Jewish diaspora made pilgrimages to the city for the festival. The text says that Jesus entered the city from beside the Mount of Olives, riding on a donkey, a reference to the book of Zachariah, which chronicles the return from Babylonian exile and the restoration of Jerusalem, describing the coming of a great king, a king of peace. It says, “Rejoice greatly o daughter of Zion, sing aloud o daughter Jerusalem. Your king comes to you, triumphant and victorious. Humble and riding on a donkey. He will cut off the chariot and the warhorse from Jerusalem and he shall command peace to the nations.” What the NRSV translates as Triumphant, Levine says, really means, in Hebrew, righteous. The focus for Zachariah and for Matthew and for Jesus is the power of justice. And the word Humble, like the word Meek, as she explained in the beatitude, “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth,” in Hebrew, does not mean gentle or submissive, but someone who will not lord it over others, who will take their place with those who are suffering, who will bring peace through compassion and understanding. In verse 9, the crowds shouted Hosanna, which in Hebrew means, “Save Us.” “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord” is an allusion to psalm 118, one of the Hallel or Hallelujah psalms sung by the pilgrims as they came to Jerusalem and sung at the Passover supper. Levine points out that the salvation sought in most of Israel’s scriptures was not spiritual but physical. Save me from slavery. From famine. From exile. It’s the same for the people in this story. And for us. She says, “The crowd wants what we all want: political reform, compassion rather than conquest, a balanced budget, affordable healthcare, clean water, peaceful streets, and lower taxes.” This also describes the kingdom of Heaven that Jesus has been speaking about, that he told us in the Sermon on the Mount was already present, if we just do what he taught us to do. If we live the way he taught us to live. What did he say? Create a community of love and compassion and justice and equality. Help make a world where angry thoughts don’t have the opportunity to lead to murder. Be aware of our own privileges and work to help those that don’t have the same benefits. Realize that we are all in this together. Know that our value doesn’t lie in what position we hold, but in what we contribute to the world. Treat one another with kindness and dignity and respect. And share what we have with each other. That is what Jesus learned from his bible, and that it what he taught us, not just with words, but with the way he lived his life. May we follow his example with the way we live our lives. Amen.

Movie With A Message - The Hundred-Foot Journey - Sermon For Week Ending March 13, 2021

The final movie in our movies with a message sermon series is the 2014 film, The hundred foot Journey,  which is available on HBO Max and Amazon Prime. It’s about an Indian family that immigrates to Europe after their Mumbai restaurant was firebombed, and their matriarch was killed. While driving in search of a location for a new restaurant, they end up in a small French village, and Abbu, the family patriarch, declares that fate brought them to this place, and it is here that they will open their new restaurant, which will be called Maison Mumbai. The middle son, Hassan, who cooked with his mother in the restaurant in Mumbai, will be the cook. Soon, though, they discover that across the street from their new restaurant is a French restaurant owned by Madam Mallory, where everyone eats, including the president of France,  and conflict begins. Although it delves into serious subjects, like prejudice against “outsiders,” The hundred foot journey is hopeful movie, showing people overcoming their distrust of those who aren’t like them, which leads them from competition to cooperation, from “us” and “them” to “we.” It is also a coming-of-age tale, has two sweet love stories, and as we saw in the clip, food is its own character. But its primary motif is the journey, and it presents all kinds of journeys, from Hassan’s family’s journey from India to France, adapting to a different culture, facing prejudice, and making personal sacrifices, to Madam Mallory’s journey to prove to herself and everyone else that her restaurant is the best, by earning a second Michelin star, to Hassan’s journey from Indian cook to French chef. The focus, though, is on the hundred- foot journey of the title, the distance between the two restaurants that each of the main characters takes, a physical and symbolic journey that involves a crucible moment for each of them, that leads them to let go of their own egos and work together. Madam Mallory makes the first move, when on Bastille Day, Maison Mumbai is fire- bombed, injuring Hassan, and graffiti is painted on their wall that says, “France is for the French.” When she finds out that one of her own cooks was responsible, she fires him and gives the rest of the staff a lesson on nationalism and prejudice, a lesson she is still learning herself, and takes the hundred -foot journey to personally clean off the graffiti. Her gesture leads Abbu to make one of his own. Then Hassan, whose hands are bandaged from the fire, asks her if they can make an omelet together. As we saw in the clip, they do, mixing French sauces and Indian spices, and after one bite, she realizes just how talented he is, more talented than she is, and she offers him a job as sous chef at her restaurant. Abbu, who before had accused her of trying to steal his son and the cook of his restaurant, now agrees to allow him to work for her. And Hassan leaves behind all he has ever known to become a French chef. Once these characters are able to see that different doesn’t mean bad, they grow closer and closer. By the end of the movie, the hundred -foot path between the two restaurants is well-worn, as their love of good food and their love for each other fuses together two families and two cultures. The journey to the togetherness that they found was not easy for any of them. It took them realizing how unnecessary the divide between them was, and being willing to lay down their armor and step out of their comfort zones in order to try to bridge that divide. It takes that for us to bridge our divides too. What can we do to get to the place of acceptance and understanding between ourselves and those we have considered others?  Study the different cultures and religions of those we share the planet with? Learn the language of the people we work with? Read books about how to become anti-racist and anti-homophobic and anti-xenophobic and put what we learn into practice? Climb down from our ladder of privilege to walk in the shoes of someone who is not privileged? New Vision has always been a bridge builder. Our community conversations 3 years ago brought together a diverse group of people in our town to discuss racism and homophobia and inequity. The theme was finding commonality and respecting diversity. These conversations led to our involvement in the Fernandina Pride Parade and Festival, and they were the foundation for the anti-racism work we are currently engaged in. But there is always more that we can do to help turn “us” and “them” into “we.” Build back trust after centuries of discrimination and dismantle those systems of discrimination. As we saw in the movie, the best way to bridge the divide between us is to physically get together, to worship and eat, socialize with and get to know people of different races and cultures and orientations and gender identities. After the pandemic is over, I want that to be one of our primary goals, to purposefully build relationships with people in our community who have different backgrounds and life experiences. I think it will be a major step for uson our journey to become the beloved community that Jesus wanted for us.

Movie With A Message - Nomadland - Sermon for Week Ending March 6, 2021

Our Movie with a message for this week is Nomadland, starring Frances McDormand, which won the Golden Globe award for best movie last Sunday. It is streaming on Hulu. It is based on the book Nomadland: Surviving America in the New Economy, about van dwellers, mostly older folks who find that even though they have worked all their lives, their retirement benefits aren’t enough for them to rent a home or stay in their home after the death of a spouse. So they buy a van or a cheap RV and live in it, traveling the country, taking  part -time jobs in order to buy gas and food. The book was written by Jessica Bruder, a journalist, who lived and worked as a van dweller for three years. The movie was adapted and directed by Cloe Zhao, who won the Golden Globe for best director. She spent 5 months in a van shooting Nomadland across 5 states, hiring many of the real van dwellers as extras and to play themselves.  Even though the main character, Fern, is fictional, the life that that it portrays is real. The setting is 2011 and the van dwellers are mostly people who couldn’t recover from the 2008 recession. Fern is a woman in her 60s who worked with her husband at the Gypsum factory in Empire, Nevada. When the recession hit, and there was less need for sheetrock, the plant closed, and in less than a year , Empire’s zip code was discontinued, as banks foreclosed and people moved away to find jobs.  Fern’s husband died during that time, and she only had social security, which wasn’t enough to live on.  A friend told her about a website called Van Dwellers,  so she bought an inexpensive van and became one of many older, dispossessed  Americans who live in their vehicles. Her first road job is in an Amazon Warehouse. You might know this, but I did not.  Amazon has a job program for van dwelling retirees. They pay their campground fees and pay  to them to stock merchandise during their busy seasons.  So if you are driving around the country, living in your van, there are Amazon warehouses where you can get a job during Christmas. Fern’s other jobs included, working the line for the sugar beet harvest, working in a rock quarry, and being a camp ground hostess, which basically meant cleaning the bathrooms and emptying trash cans.  Along the way, Fern met Bob Wells, who plays himself in the movie, the person who made the website, so that van dwellers could meet up once in awhile.  Bob hosts a rendezvous once a year at an Arizona campground, as a support system for van-dwellers who need help.  There, they trade can openers for pot holders, learn how to patch tires and find the safest illegal place to park in different towns. It’s a sad predicament that they try to make the best of. The primary theme of the movie is economic injustice. The fact that, because of circumstances beyond their control, older Americans, most of them women, cannot afford to pay rent and buy food,  so live in their vehicles, eat canned soup off a hot plate,  and go to the bathroom in a bucket, while begging for low paying, temporary jobs is a travesty. As one of the documentaries I watched about van dwellers said, “The three legged stool of social security, private pensions, and personal savings has given way to a pogo stick, with social security as the only wobbly leg.”  Fern puts it more bluntly, saying, The American dream is a lie. The Amazon Camp force is blatant exploitation of cheap seasonal labor by people who can’t even afford a home. Because I am a person of privilege, before I turned 65, I naively thought that all of Medicare was free.  Medicare is very expensive. The majority of older people in our society can’t afford it. What does it say about us that we treat our elders this way? Another theme in the movie is loss and grief.  Like most of the people she meets, Fern is alone. She lost her husband Bo, her home, her town, and her friends. At one point, she goes back to Empire to sell what little she had in storage there, and she walks through what is now a ghost town, we can see in her face and her gait what all this loss has done to her. Like so many of the other van dwellers, she is grieving.  We don’t see her doing anything enjoyable, just existing from one day to the next. Finally, though, there is the theme of community. Nomadland reminds us that we can find community anywhere, no matter how poor our circumstances. While Fern keeps mostly to herself, she does make some good friends.  And the scenes of the real van dwellers show how much they depend on each other, enjoy each other’s company, and come to love those they only see a few times a year. The need for community is the reason Bob Wells started the website and the meet-ups. And they are a lifeline for  them. It seems that almost all of my sermons have a theme of community. I think it’s because community is so important to me. Even when we desire solitude, we still need to know that there are people who care about us, and who we can depend on. Jesus taught us about community in the Sermon on the Mount and in the way he lived his life. And we, who today are marking one year since we worshipped together in our sanctuary, are just as strong a community as ever. We love each other, and we are there for each other, not matter what.  And that is something we can all be grateful for.

Movie With A Message - News Of The World - Sermon for Week ending February 27, 2021

 

The 2020 film News of the World, starring Tom Hanks, opened Christmas Day in theaters and is available for rent on Amazon Prime.  Hopefully, it will soon be free to watch because it is such a good movie. It takes place in Texas in 1870, before Texas was allowed to re-join the Union after the Civil War, as they had not yet agreed to outlaw slavery. It was a violent place. White Texans murdered Black, Mexican, and Indian people at will. Hank’s character, Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd, a veteran and a printer before the war, now travels to remote outposts in Northern Texas to read the news to settlers for a 10 cent donation. Outside Witchita Falls, he comes across a young child in the woods, a victim of the wars over land between settlers and Indians. He learns that her white birth parents were killed; then her Kiowa parents were killed.  The only language she knows is Kiowa. She has Indian agency papers listing her given name and the names of her only living blood relatives, an aunt and uncle living in a German settlement 400 miles South in Castroville. When he can’t get anyone to take her there, he does it himself. I won’t give the plot away since you probably haven’t seen it yet, but their trip is fraught with danger, and they come close to dying more than once. The movie has lots of meaningful themes prejudice and white supremacy, lawlessness and violence, making sacrifices to do what is right, and the idea that if you save someone’s life, you are responsible for them. I think the primary theme is, “Where is home? And who is family?” This child was taken from one home and family and raised in another home by another family. She even has 2 names. Johanna was her given name. Cicada is her Kiowa name. Captain Kidd is taking her to a home she can’t remember and a family she has never known, whose language she doesn’t speak and whose culture is foreign to her. In what home and with what family she ends up in isn’t known by us movie watchers until the end. So where is home? And who is family to us? Is home where we feel we belong? Where we feel safe? Where our hearts are? Can we find home in more than one place in our lifetime? In the gospels, Jesus doesn’t have a permanent home. He did. And he feels at home in different places. But he’s an itinerant preacher. In the gospel of Mark, when he was told that his mother and brothers were outside the place he was preaching, and wanted to see him, he replied, “Who are my mother and my brothers? “ And looking at those who sat around him, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers.” Jesus wasn’t rejecting his family of birth. He loved them. He was making the point that the definition of family can be broader. As he journeyed from place to place, he created a great big chosen family. Gay people all over the world who have been rejected by their birth families do the same. They create beautiful chosen families who love and understand and accept them. My other favorite theme in the movie is expressed in a conversation between Captain Kidd and Johanna, when they are teaching each other words of their language and how those words convey their religious and cultural beliefs and their view of the world and life. Johanna tells him that in Kiowa, the word Daw means God, life, spirit, and circle. And while she is saying this, she makes a circle with her arms, the circle that is sacred to Native American tribes, observed in the sun and moon and stars and seasons, turning within itself and therefore never ending. Kidd responds that to his people, life is more of a straight line. And it is best not to look back. Just to keep moving forward. We can hear bitterness in his voice when he says this, like he doesn’t think it’s a good view of life, but that he is resigned to it for now. Johanna tells him that in order to move forward, you first have to go back and remember. She circles back, physically and metaphorically, and eventually, he does too. I love the image of life as an ever-turning circle. It evokes our connection to God, the earth and all its creatures, to our ancestors, and one another. It’s a vision of unity and wholeness. But I think Captain Kidd’s straight- line image, better describes life in our western world, where we only go forward from one task to another with efficiency and purpose, like we are in a race to see how much we can achieve before we die. Too many times we don’t stop to appreciate and enjoy our surroundings or ponder the big questions about life and death like other cultures do. We just keep moving towards the finish line. I think this comes from the white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant Ethic most of us learned from our parents and grandparents, which values rugged individualism and ambition and achievement. But life is so much more, isn’t it? It is love and laughter and books and art and music. It is long aimless walks and stories around the fire. It’s the healing power of our natural world, and our connection to other people. To me life is humanity and spirit and God, all together, in an unfolding, eternal circle of wholeness. These themes of different kinds of home and families and different ways of viewing the world challenge us to expand our thinking from what we have been taught, what we have assumed, or what we believed in the past. To consider broader definitions of home and family and a more inclusive and unified view of life. Our new book club book, Think Again, is about this, the art of rethinking the ideologies that we have held on to, and embracing something new. And it’s what Progressive Christianity is all about, having the courage to question what we thought we knew for certain, which can bring us to a new, more meaningful relationship to God and the Bible and each other.

 

 

Movies With A Message - Hotel Rwanda - Sermon for Week Ending February 20, 2021

The 2004 film Hotel Rwanda is based on the true story of a group of people trying to survive the Rwandan genocide in 1994 of over 800,000 Tutsis and politically moderate Hutu by paramilitary extremists back by the Hutu-led government. The genocide took place in 100 days, and is called “the fastest, most efficient killing spree of the 20^th century.” The story opens in the days before the massacre began. Paul Rusesabagina, is the house manager of a 4 star Belgian hotel in Kigali, the capital of this former Belgian colony. He is a Hutu. His wife, Tatiana is a Tutsi.  While a militia of Tutsis that had been forced from the country by the Hutus is reportedly on the outskirts of the city, ready to attack. Paul hears from his brother-in-law that the Hutu militia is planning to kill all the Tutsis, but he doesn’t believe it, because, as he says, “The UN is here. They have brokered a peace treaty. The whole world is watching.” He is shocked when the killing does begin, but he immediately focuses on keeping his wife and family safe. Soon, he is sheltering extended family, neighbors, and strangers who have heard that they could find refuge at the hotel. Paul witnessed and experienced unimaginable violence. He was ordered to shoot his family and friends or be killed himself. While going for food, he found the roads blocked by bodies that had been slaughtered by machetes and garden tools. Some were still alive. And in town, he saw Tutsi women and girls in cages being raped and murdered. After that, he begged Tatiana that if the killers ever got inside the hotel, to take their children, go to the roof, and jump off, rather than be murdered by a machete. Soon, French and Belgian soldiers arrived, but only to rescue the white foreign nationals staying at the hotel, not the Rwandans. The small UN peace-keeping force there had orders not to intervene. They even refused to take the Rwandan children who had been rescued from an orphanage, where the other children had been murdered while the Red Cross volunteer was forced to watch. Paul was only able to keep those who were inside the hotel, which quickly grew to over 1200, safe, by bribing a general to put out the word that if the hotel was attacked, the Belgian army would respond. He kept them all safe, but when the Tutsis regained power, they joined the 1.3 million primarily Hutu refugees in Tanzania and Zaire. The producer of the movie said that he made it because there was such little attention given to the genocide by the western world, with many people still being unaware that it happened. At the root of this lack of caring is racism. From the colonizers, whose interest in eugenics led them to separate Hutus and Tutsis by their physical appearance, to the western media’s depiction of the genocide as tribal warfare, as they had no understanding of Rwanda’s Colonial history, to the United States refusing to help when they knew the genocide was happening, which they most certainly would have done if it were in England or France. Paul learned that that rest of the world didn’t care from a journalist and a UN peacekeeper. While he was helping the journalist get out video of the massacre, he was so hopeful that help would come. But the journalist said to him, “I think if people see this footage, they will say, ‘Oh God, that’s horrible!’ and then go on eating their dinners.” The UN colonel said to Paul, “To the West, you are dirt, worse than dirt, because you are black.” I read a study of the lack of coverage of the genocide by the major networks in the U.S. And some of the reasons given were: that it didn’t involve US interests. (During that time they were covering Haiti because Haitian refugees were landing in Florida.)  They didn’t like covering events that didn’t focus on US acts of benevolence. And the folks at home couldn’t understand who were the good guys and who were the bad guys, so they lost interest. The primary reason for the lack of coverage was that, when the white people were evacuated from Rwanda, the journalists who were there left. As we hear in the movie, as 8,000 Rwandans were being murdered every day, the US government not only refused to send help, but their officials refused to even use the word genocide, because doing so might obligate them to intervene. There is also a lesson about how inflammatory speech incites mob violence, which we witnessed in our country recently. But the movie and the real life story of Paul and Tatiana Rusesabagina also show us that no matter what unspeakable horror is happening around us, there are still good people who make enormous sacrifices to save their fellow humans. As more and more people flee to the hotel for refuge, we hear Paul say to them, “There is always room.” And he says it again when they arrive at a temporary camp just across the border, and end up taking a large group of orphaned children and the Red Cross volunteer with them to Tanzania, on what seems like a very full bus. For Paul and those who helped him, It didn’t matter if people were black or white, Hutu or Tutsi. They worked together to do as much good for as many people as they could. May we remember that there is always room, In our homes, at our table, in our schedules, in our wallets, and in our hearts for our fellow humans.

Movie With A Message - Ma Rainey's Black Bottom - Sermon for week ended February 13, 2021

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is a film adaptation of August Wilson’s 1984 play, a fictional drama about a real person, and part of a cycle of 10 plays portraying the African-American experience in different decades across the 20^th century. The setting is Chicago in 1927, during the Great Migration of black people from the South to the North. Chicago and other Northern industrial cities recruited black people from the Jim Crow South to work in their factories, and as waiters and bellhops. And they left the South in droves with high hopes, as they headed to what was advertised as The Promised Land where they could find jobs and dignity. But Chicago was not much more enlightened than the South was. Newly arrived migrants lived 6 to a room in temporary housing and were only allowed permanent housing in a narrow strip on the South side. Even their presence in white areas brought protests. The director of the Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, George Wolfe, said, “In the South, black people could often support themselves in their own communities. When they came north, if they wanted to achieve, they had to come into contact with the white power structure, which meant that their own power was, in essence, nullified.” The play and the film portray this loss of power with a recording session by Ma Rainey, a black, old-school southern blues singer, and her band for a white record producer.  Before ma arrives at the studio, we see the producer and ma’s white agent planning how to keep her in line, but when she does get there, kow towing to her because she is putting money in their pockets. In the south, Ma makes a great living touring as “the mother of the blues,” but in Chicago, she is seen as just another black woman. And Ma knows this. She knows they can barely stand her presence in their space. So, because she can, she makes their day as difficult as possible. She says to one of the band members after demanding that the white men send out for a coca cola for her before she will sing ,“They don’t care nuthin’ about me. All they want is my voice. Well, I done learned that, and they are gonna treat me like I want to be treated no matter how much it hurts them. They are back there now, calling me all kinds of names, everything but a child of God. But they can’t do nothing else. They ain’t got what they wanted yet. As soon as they get my voice down on them recording machines, they ain’t got no use for me.” I read an article recently that is a reminder that the exploitation of black artists continues even today. It was about Shonda Rimes, a black television producer who created and produced 5 mega-hit shows, for ABC , which is owned by Disney, making the network 2 billion dollars. But at every budget meeting, for 15 years, she says, she had to fight for the money to make her shows. And at every contract negotiation, she had to fight for fair pay. As part of her contract, she was given a 154 dollar all-inclusive pass to Disneyland. They aren’t transferable, so she asked for an additional one for her sister. Her request was passed back and forth between executives at Disney, which has a net worth of 190 billion dollars and the last one said to her, “Don’t you have enough?” So Shonda, because she could, left ABC and Disney and moved to Netflix, where her new series Bridgerton is their most watched show ever. Her critics said she was being petty, but for her, this was just the latest example of how little she was valued by a company she had done so much for. And she echoed Ma Rainey when she was asked why she left. She said, “They love to ask you for blood, but when you need a towel, it’s too much. Don’t let any employer treat valuing you as a favor.” The other main character in the play is Levee, a young trumpet player and song writer, also from the south, who witnessed more violence as a child than anyone should ,and who believes his only chance at success here is to fit in in this new world. But unlike Ma, Levee doesn’t know how to navigate the white power structure that is his gatekeeper. He thinks that his confident, cocky manner, the way he dresses, and his new style of blues and jazz will make him famous with the new migrants and cross over to white record buyers. He says, “I don’t need nobody telling me nothing. The white man will respect me when I get my band together.” But his Bravado is mostly a cover for his fear that he can’t make it in this new world. Throughout the play, we see his anger at having to live under the control of white people, just as his parents had to do in the south. In the end, after all the promises made to him by the record producer are broken, Levee comes to represent the tragedy of talented, hopeful young black people who are held back from realizing their dreams no matter how hard they try. There is much more in the play about the history of white supremacy in America, that continues today. It serves as another tool for those of us who want to educate ourselves so that we can help change that. May we always be open to what our Still-Speaking God is saying to us, through movies and books and plays and songs, so that we can become more justice-seeking and more faithful followers of the way of Jesus.

Movie With A Message - Erin Brockovich - Sermon for Week Ending February 6, 2021

As we just saw, our movie with a message this week is Erin Brockovich, the true story of the fight for clean water in the small town of Hinkley, California in 1996. The real Erin Brockovich is still active in the fight for clean water. She has a new book out called Superman is Not Coming: Our National Water Crisis, and a podcast by the same name where she interviews everyday people who are working for change in their communities. In the movie, we see the beginnings of her quest to hold accountable anyone who endangers human lives for their own profit. A single mom of three, with a high school education and a no nonsense way of communicating, Erin experienced the pain of classism at every turn in life. She couldn’t find a job that would pay enough for her to hire a babysitter for her children and still pay rent and put food on the table. When she was severely injured in a car accident that wasn’t her fault, and went to court to try to get a settlement to pay her bills, she ended up being the one put on trial, because the person who hit her was a respected doctor, and she was portrayed as just some low-life floozy trying to get money from him. When she finally did get a job as a file clerk at a law firm, she was snubbed by the other women there because they didn’t approve of the way she dressed. All of it was hurtful, but she refused to let other people’s opinions stop her from being herself, and doing what she knew was right, when she uncovered the deception by Pacific Gas and Electricity, that was making people in the community of Hinkley sick. The chromium 6 they used in their pipes to keep them from rusting was toxic, known to cause cancer and a host of other illnesses. When it seeped into the ground water in the 1950s, the company kept it a secret. And as we saw in the clip, when folks began to suspect that the water and the illnesses might be connected, PG&E sent them to company doctors, who convinced them that they weren’t. Everybody who underestimated Erin Brockovich really shouldn’t have. Her desire to make life better for people like her, who struggled financially, her tenacity, and her amazing brain (dyslexia allowed her to see patterns when reading, and she had a photographic memory) made her unstoppable. There’s a great scene I wanted to include a clip of (but I couldn’t because her language is a bit too colorful,) where the company tries to low ball them on a settlement, saying that the offer is more than any of ‘these people’ have ever dreamed of. Brockovich replies, “’These people’ might not be the most sophisticated people, but they do no how to divide, and what you are offering isn’t much split, between them. ‘These people’ don’t dream about being rich. They dream about being able to watch their kids swim in a pool without worrying that they’ll have to have a hysterectomy at age 20 or have their spine deteriorate. So before you come back here with another lame offer, I want you to think real hard about what your spine is worth or what you’d expect someone to pay for your uterus. Then you take out your calculator and multiply that number by a hundred. Anything less than that is a waste of our time.” Another theme is the need to work together to make change happen. Erin could communicate easily with people in this working-class town with her down-to-earth manner. She was sincere, she had faith in them, and she earned their trust. In the end, 634 residents signed on to the class action suit against PG&E.  And the payout was $333 million dollars, more than a hundred times their first offer. She still sees herself in that role. She says in the introduction to her book, “For years, I’ve been teaching one very simple concept, Superman is not coming to save you. Without water, it is literally game over for us. The time has come for us to save ourselves. No one person can fix this. It’s up to all of us. We’ve got to work together.” Of course this teaching applies to everything that needs changing in our world. It takes a village to stand up together and speak out against injustice, and it takes weeks, months, even years of hard work before we can see any progress. I think the most important thing that the movie and Erin’s work did was to bring to light the overwhelming prevalence of polluting industries in low income neighborhoods like Hinkley because they are considered the path of least resistance, since their residents have less money and less political clout to oppose it. I read a study that found “a consistent pattern over a 30-year period of placing hazardous waste facilities in neighborhoods where poor people and people of color live.” In my own privilege, I didn’t think much about why, when we were remodeling our home in Decatur, we had to drive 15 miles south to the county landfill. I know why now. In Flint, Michigan, every elected official and decision maker who chose, for years, to put toxic water into the bodies of their residents, 45 percent of whom live below the poverty line, should be held accountable. And, lest we think that the big payout in the movie Erin Brockovich took care of everything and everyone, the town of Hinkley, California is still contaminated with chromium 6, 25 years later. The water board predicts that it will take up to 50 years for 80 percent of the cleanup to be complete. In the meantime, it is deemed an uninsurable wasteland. This crisis is just one part of the systemic racism and classism that define our country. As people who care about justice and equality, we must rise up to fight for it, no matter how long or how much work it takes. That’s who we are. So let’s educate ourselves about the problems in our own community that cause harm and what we can do to help solve them. And then, together, let’s get to work making it happen.

Movie with a Message - The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel - Sermon for Week ending January 30, 2021

Sermon: 

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, was released in 2012, with an all-star cast, including Judi Dench and Maggie Smith. I think it is a wonderful movie, full of humanity and soul. There’s also a sequel, which came out in 2015 and is almost as good. As we saw in the clip, the movie is about a group of seniors who go to Jaipur, India to live out their years in what is described as a luxury hotel for the elderly and beautiful. Each of them is at a crossroads and needs to make a change in order to survive and hopefully thrive. Evelyn’s husband has just died, and his debts wiped out their life savings, so her flat has to be sold. Her son invites her to live with him and his family, but she doesn’t want that. After 40 years with an overbearing husband who made all the decisions, she wants some independence and a chance to make her own decisions. Graham is a London high court judge who dreads being put out to pasture as he has seen  happen to his colleagues. Douglas and Jean have been disappointed in their search for assisted living, because they can’t afford what they would like to have.  Muriel, a former live-in housekeeper, needs a new hip, but there is a 6-month waiting list and it is very expensive. Her doctor tells her about a partnership they have where she can have it done in India immediately for an affordable price. Of course, when they get to Jaipur, they find that the actual Best Exotic Marigold Hotel bears little resemblance to what was advertised. But after meeting the always positive manager, Sonny, they decide to stay and try to make it work. The movie could have easily become a farce here, “The misadventures of old people on a romp through India,” But it doesn’t. It doesn’t stereotype its characters. It shows them as real, imperfect people facing disappointment, finding romance, growing, and changing. It has so many great themes. The primary one, I think, is the different ways that people in their 70s and 80s approach and deal with a new, unfamiliar life change, country, and culture. India, where most of the movie was filmed, is its own character in the movie, a magical, modern place that is a riot of noise and color. Evelyn, who has never held a job, is the one who embraces her new life the fastest.  She has to get a job to make ends meet, so she applies for one at a call center. Initially disappointed when her interviewer tells her that it is a place for ambitious young people, she gets hired as a cultural adviser, teaching the young callers how to talk to old people on the phone. She loves the noise and the crowds of the city. She even writes a daily blog about it, saying shortly after they arrived, “Old habits die easier than you think, and new ones form. Initially you are overwhelmed, but gradually you realize it’s like a wave. Dive into it, and you’ll swim out the other side. This is a new world. The challenge is not just to cope, but thrive.”  Two others embrace the culture of India very quickly. Douglas visits temples and palaces and indulges in the cuisine. Graham, who grew up in India, plays cricket with the children in the street, and when he’s asked what he finds so wonderful about Jaipur, he replies, “All life is here.” Attitude and willingness to grow and change make all the difference. These three thrive here. It becomes their home more than England ever was. For Muriel, the change was difficult.  She was the oldest of the group, and openly xenophobic.  As soon as she got her new hip, she wanted to go back to England. But she had no one there. Her change in attitude started when,  unaware of the rules and traditions of the caste system, she began to talk with the woman who brought her food, who was an untouchable. The woman was so grateful for her acknowledgement, she invited her to meet her family, and she and Muriel became friends.  Jean, Douglas’s wife, barely tries to embrace India and its culture. To her, it is poverty and squalor. She sits at the hotel all day, becoming more and more negative. And she is the one of the group who goes back to England. One of them dies, and the rest become a family. Before, like many old people, they had been made to feel like they had nothing left to contribute to society. But here, they find purpose and community. These characters speak to me and inspire me as a newish senior. You all inspire me too. I agree that attitude is everything. We can be angry and negative and refuse to grow, or we can be positive and see the possibilities for new adventure, friends, and purpose. I hope to follow that way, going forward and grabbing all the life and purpose I can. The movie ends with Evelyn narrating a blog entry about what they have learned on their journey so far.  She says, “The only real failure is the failure to try. The measure of success is how we cope with disappointment, as we always must. But it is also true that the person that risks nothing does nothing, has nothing. We came here and we tried. All of us in our different ways.  We get up in the morning. We do our best.  All we know about the future is that it will be different. Perhaps what we fear is that it will be the same. So we must celebrate the changes every day.