Cat Goodrich

Faith Presbyterian Church, Baltimore, MD

October 25, 2020

All You Need Is Love

Matthew 22: 34-46

 

If you look up as you walk along Bleeker Street in Manhattan, you might notice, among the tangle of cables and telephone wires and power lines, a thin filament of fishing line high above you, running parallel to the street.[1]  If you kept walking, from Houston Street all the way up to 126^th, you would see that line wind its way from telephone pole to telephone pole, building to fence post and back, encircling a portion of the city completely.  The fishing line, so thin you can only see it when the light catches it just so, is an eruv, and it’s there to help orthodox Jewish people keep the Sabbath.  There are eruv in Baltimore, too, three of them – the oldest is in Northwest Baltimore, surrounding Mt. Washington and running up to 695 and back.  As you know, a Sabbath is a day of rest, when God’s busy people are meant to rest – rest from work, dial back the frenetic pace that keeps us driving and cooking and hauling things from one place to another during the week.  For some strictly observant Jewish people, sabbath also means rest from using electricity, and even rest from carrying things – small necessary things like house keys, and medicine, and children.

 

How does anyone accomplish this?

 

The prohibition from carrying things does not apply at home. So the line, the eruv, is a symbolic enclosure that extends the area where observant Jews can carry things on the Sabbath.  It makes public space common private space in the eyes of the law, pushing the walls of the home out into the world.  Practically, this means young families can get out for walks and to synagogue on Saturdays instead of staying cooped up in their houses or apartments.  Now this line, the eruv, sounds like a recent innovation, an adaptation of the ancient law to fit our modern lifestyles, but actually it’s been in use for more than 1500 years.  The arrangement for the eruv in Manhattan dates back to the 1870’s, when the city agreed to lease access to the land for just $1 annually.  So for a long time, people have sought and at times struggled to interpret religious law in ways that are both faithful and lifegiving.

 

The legal code of ancient Israel is famously extensive.  There are 613 commandments written in the Torah (the first five books of the Bible), laws to cover everything from preventing criminal activity to regulating food and personal conduct.  The legal code is further extended by a huge body of rabbinic interpretation and oral tradition.  Together, the rabbinic tradition along with the written commandments is known as the Halakha – a word derived from the verb that means to walk.  That means the collection of the law together with its interpretation, is called, essentially, the way to walk.   In ancient Israel, the law did more than just explicate what people could and couldn’t do.  The law formed the community and was a guide for faithfully walking through life…but it was so extensive, the commentary so unwieldy, it was hard to fully follow it unless one was a priest or rabbi and could devote significant time to study and keeping the law.

 

That is why the question the lawyer posed to Jesus is so tricky: which commandment is the most important?  Jesus has been in the temple fielding all sorts of hard questions from the religious leaders, who are looking for a reason to kick him out or- better yet- condemn him to death.  There isn’t a clear or easy answer to this one.  The law isn’t written in a prioritized list, it’s a complex and interconnected way of walking – to privilege one law over all the others is problematic.  Yet Jesus, this itinerant preacher from Nazareth, manages to do it.  In a short answer, he distills the laws, all 613 of them, down to their core, the most essential part – what he calls the hook on which all the rest of the torah hangs: Love! Love for God, love for self, and love for neighbor.

 

It seems like people got so caught up in keeping the law they forgot the purpose of the law in the first place – to create just, healthy, flourishing communities filled with faithful, loving people.  Jesus is trying to remind them – and us – that Love should be the plumb line, guiding everything else that they do.

 

Love is a powerful motivator.  But this is not the love of hallmark cards.  It’s not the kind of love that leads one to swipe left or right.  It’s not saccharine, surface level, or fleeting.  It’s bigger, deeper, and stronger than that. The love Jesus is talking about is not just a feeling, it’s an action – love that cares for and seeks the best for others.  Love brings plenty of wonderful moments, but it also leads us to hard places – it means we stay by the hospital bed, we visit the memory care unit, we stand at the kitchen sink even though we’re exhausted because the dishes need to be done.  We show up.  These days, love may mean also doing the hard work of staying apart, so that those who are vulnerable stay healthy.  Or going someplace you may not be completely jazzed about going – like a second lengthy church service in one day.

 

It’s easier, I think, to understand this love for our neighbors in a direct, interpersonal sense.  With our actual family, and friends, and neighbors – those whose lives run parallel and occasionally intersect with ours.  But this love of God and love of neighbor is an ethic of mutuality that can and must be scaled up and out, to encompass those who are farther afield – those connected to us by economic, political, or relational ties that are looser, more tenuous.  These neighbors are people with whom we may feel we have little in common – those of a different culture, or language, political party, or national identity.  These far-off neighbors may be the hardest of all to love.  How do we do it?

 

After the terrible shootings at the Christchurch mosques in New Zealand, the Birmingham Islamic Society opened its doors for a community vigil in solidarity – people needed to gather, to pray and grieve and rage and show support for each other.  Our whole family went.  We showed up a bit late, so the room was fairly full when we arrived.  We found a cubby for our shoes and slipped in the back, sitting criss cross applesauce on the plush carpeted floor with our neighbors.  A young man in his early 20’s sat in front of us, a member of the masjid.  He scooted over to make sure we could see, and smiled at us, and started making faces at Gillian, making her laugh and keeping her entertained as person after person stood and shared their grief and words of support.  After a while, he just held her little hand, and we sat together.  “I have a cousin her age,” he told me.  It was such a small thing.  But it was also everything.

 

To love our neighbors is to grieve together, when a tragedy happens.  Loving God by loving neighbor looks like love shared in the public square – hands held not in romance but in solidarity, with striking workers or protesting police brutality or calling others to vote.  The kind of love we’re called to says – I can’t be who I am without valuing who God created you to be, whomever you love, whatever your pronouns.  This kind of love advocates for others – it says

that the children separated from their families and who cannot be located by our government – they are our children.  The men behind bars are our fathers and brothers and uncles.  The elderly at risk are our grandparents, our mothers, our fathers.  This is the kind of love that defines us.  This is the work to which we are called.  Love that shapes the law is not just a feeling, it’s an action – a way of walking together.

 

Today, we will officially mark the beginning of our ministry together and I believe I was called here because God has great things in store for us.  Imagine what might happen if, when we leave our houses in the coming days, we looked up.  Imagine we saw there a thin filament, barely visible to the naked eye, stretching out in either direction, pushing the walls of our home out into the world.  Expanding our definition of neighbor to include those across town, those who don’t speak or act or look or worship like we do, whom we are called to love as we love God and ourselves.  What if that thin line helped us to scale our ethic of mutuality upwards and outwards to include… everyone?  When we allow ourselves to be guided by this ethic of mutuality, loving God, and loving our neighbors – the compassion and compelling magic of this place will only grow, deepen, and continue to transform our lives and the lives of our neighbors and of this city in incredible ways.  I can’t wait to find out.

 

[1] I learned about this symbolic enclosure from a report on NPR’s All Things Considered, “A Fishing Line Encircles Manhattan, Protecting the Sanctity of Sabbath,” by Monique Laborde, 5/13/19, https://www.npr.org/2019/05/13/721551785/a-fishing-line-encircles-manhattan-protecting-sanctity-of-sabbath

Cat Goodrich
Faith Presbyterian Church, Baltimore, MD
October 11, 2020

Rejoice?
Philippians 4:1-9

 

Last weekend, Dary, the girls and I went out to see the sunflower field that Scott McGill’s company, Ecotone, planted out in Baldwin, and I’m so glad we did.  Tall, stately sunflowers stretching out as far as the eye could see – mostly all facing the same direction (east) with their heads bowing over, nodding towards the promise of sunrise.  It was beautiful.  As you might imagine, the girls were delighted!  They stopped to admire each blossom, complimenting them as if they were people.  As I watched them run, giggling, through the field, chasing each other, with the sun warming my face and the blue sky overhead and the enormous flowers all around, I was overcome with something like happiness, and gratitude for that moment, the people I was with, the beauty of the good earth.  The only word I have for that feeling is joy.  Deep, fleeting, joy.

Can you remember the last time you felt that way?  Maybe for some of you, it was just yesterday, or even this morning.  For others, perhaps it’s been a long time.  I mean, joy is not necessarily the emotion I’d use to characterize these past few months.  Joyful is not how I would describe this year, a year that gave rise to a thousand dumpster fire memes.  This year plenty of us have felt anxious, sure.  Stressed.  Furious, sometimes.  Preoccupied and worried, maybe even afraid or even numb.  But not necessarily joyful.

In fact, a flurry of articles were written by mental health professionals over the past few weeks observing that we are now more than six months into this pandemic, and the six month mark of any crisis is when many people tend to hit a wall.[1]  We’ve adjusted to the new normal of life despite Covid: worshipping online,  an assortment of masks by the front door, and hand sanitizer in our pockets.  We’ve figured out our grocery routines and how to work remotely, we’ve learned to connect to friends and family through Zoom.  But we’re tired.  About six or so months in, people are over it, ready for the illness to go away, yearning for a sense of normalcy.  When runners talk about hitting a wall, they mean they’ve used up all their energy stores and aren’t sure they can push on.  So six months into this marathon of a pandemic, it is normal to feel tired.  Depleted, running on empty.  It’s normal if you are finding it hard to focus, much less be creative or innovate.  Worry about the coming election, and the madness of the national news doesn’t help, either.  It can make us feel ready, even, to give up and turn off the news and try to forget all of this ever happened.  We’ve hit a wall.

It can make Paul’s letter ring a bit hollow, can’t it?  “Rejoice in the Lord always, again I say, rejoice!”

Is joy a feeling that can be summoned, just because we want to feel it?  What is joy, and how is it different from happiness?  The folks in our Bible Study shared what was bringing them joy these days: time outside in nature, in beautiful places – camping or hiking in the woods, walking on the beach, or time with friends and family brings them joy.  Ingrid Lee, a designer turned happiness expert says joy is “an intense momentary experience that makes us smile and laugh, and feel like we want to jump up and down.” [2] Through her work, she has dug into what sparks joy.  She’s discovered there are things which universally inspire joy – across ages and stages and cultures.  Bright pops of color, a sense of abundance and multiplicity; symmetry; round, curved objects; and a sense of lightness – found in bubbles, sprinkles, rainbows, fireworks, and yes, a field full of sunflowers.  She says our joy in these things, “reminds us of the shared humanity we find in our common experience of the physical world.”  Joy connects us to one another!

Maybe when Paul says, ”Rejoice in the Lord always,” he’s tapping into the sense of connection and shared identity that come from being part of the church.  Because he feels deeply connected to these people – maybe closer to the Philippian church than to any other church he started. He calls them his joy and crown!  He longs to be with them, he loves them and misses them.  In his absence, the people in the church in Philippi have had a few squabbles, as church folk sometimes do – so he’s writing to encourage them to work it out, for the sake of the gospel and the wider community.  As an aside, it brings me joy to know that the leaders of this beloved church were women!  Though many of their names are lost, women did figure prominently in leading and supporting the early church!  Thanks be to God!

It’s important to remember that Paul’s not away from the church in Philippi because he’s out on his missionary travels, and he’s not writing them from the comfort of his home.  Paul is writing from prison.  He was imprisoned for evangelizing, for preaching the gospel and building communities of radical inclusion that threatened the social order and drew unwanted attention of religious authorities.  So it is in a jail cell that he writes, “Rejoice in the Lord always, again I say, rejoice.” There were surely no pops of color, no fireworks or sunflowers or sprinkles in a Roman jail cell, so what kind of joy is he talking about?!  And how do we attune ourselves to it?

The joy Paul is talking about is a joy rooted in the enduring love and goodness of God.  That kind of joy does not arise from your current context, which changes day by day, moment by moment.  God is beneath, above, around and in all things – and God’s grace and love made known to us in Christ makes it possible for us to be joyful whatever happens, no matter what.  Paul calls joy a fruit of the Spirit – an outcome of the life of faith, made possible by the work of the Spirit within us.  Karl Barth calls joy in Philippians “a defiant Nevertheless.”[3] Regardless of present circumstances, we will rejoice.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German theologian and Lutheran pastor who helped lead resistance to the Nazi infiltration of the church in the 1930’s and early 1940’s.  Though he was a member of the Nazi intelligence, he worked for the German resistance and was eventually imprisoned for his critique of the regime and involvement in a plot to assassinate Hitler.  While in prison, he wrote countless letters to his family, fiancé, and friends – which express both his deep appreciation for the books and cigarettes they smuggled in to him, and also a sense of joy.  “The calmness and joy with which we meet what is laid on us are as infectious as the terror I see among the [other] people here…” he wrote.[4]  Joy, despite miserable circumstances.  He writes to his fiancé about their union as “a token of God’s grace and goodness, which summon us to believe in [God]…” …and gives them hope and faith in the future.  Faith, he writes, “that endures in the world and loves and remains true to that world in spite of all the hardships it brings us.”[5] Faith despite hardship.  Joy despite suffering.  A defiant nevertheless!

Here, six and a half months into this pandemic that has upended life as we knew it, a few weeks out from a crucial national election, in a country that is bitterly divided along partisan lines, with a militia storming the statehouse in Michigan and dehumanizing dissents coming out of the highest court of the land… we may be hitting the wall.  Exhausted.  Weary and longing for an escape.  So believe it or not, now is a good time for us to embrace Paul’s exhortation to rejoice!  One commentator called Christian joy “not an outcome based on circumstances,” but rather “a discipline of perception.”[6]

And Paul teaches us how to tap into that deep and abiding joy.  “Do not worry about anything,” he writes, “but by prayer and supplication make your requests be made known to God.”  Now, my former colleague Shannon Webster says a lot of people read this and want to make God into the great vending machine in the sky, where you put in a prayer and get out exactly what you asked for.  But we know this is not how the world works.  It’s not how God works.  Prayer is a practice, a daily effort to listen and attune our hearts to God’s.  If anything, prayer is a discipline of attention – attending to God’s presence with us, asking for help where we need it, lamenting the brokenness around us and asking for God’s intervention, and again and again, lifting up our gratitude for the blessing of this life.  This practice doesn’t give us exactly what we want, but it will bring us peace.

For the most part, we cannot control what happens to us.  Our circumstances are forever changing.  But we can control how we respond to them.  We can view the microcosm of goodness – the love we share with family and friends, the quiet wonder of the world around us, the warmth of being known and valued, the stunning stately beauty of a field of sunflowers – as testimony to the larger goodness of God who created us, loves us, and calls us good.  And even now, whatever happens to us, maybe we can rejoice!  Thanks be to God.

[1] Doyle, Nancy, “Professor Ahmad’s Six-Month Wall: Rehumanizing the Virtual Workplace,” Forbes, 9/24/20, https://www.forbes.com/sites/drnancydoyle/2020/09/24/professor-ahmads-six-month-wall-rehumanizing-the-virtual-workplace-with-the-human-touch/#f95323368ad4.

[2] Lee, Ingrid Fetell, “Where joy hides and how to find it” TED talk, April 2018, https://www.ted.com/talks/ingrid_fetell_lee_where_joy_hides_and_how_to_find_it/transcript.

[3] Barth, Karl, The Epistle to the Philippians, qtd. by Daniel Migliore in Philippians and Philemon, Westminster John Knox Press: Louisville, KY, 2014, pg 156.

[4] Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, Letters and Papers From Prison, Eberhard Bethge, ed; Collier Books/Macmillan Publishing Company: New York, 1971, p 156.

[5] Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, qtd. by Micah Royal in a post to Spiritual and Communal Responses to Covid-19 Facebook group, 10/8/20.

[6] Eddy, Nathan “Homiletical Perspective on Philippians 4:1-9” in Feasting on the Word Year A, Volume 4, David Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor, eds. Westminster, John Knox Press: Louisville, KY, 2011, p 161.

Cat Goodrich
Faith Presbyterian Church, Baltimore, MD
October 4, 2020

Feasts
Matthew 21:33-46

 

Things have been so calm and peaceful this week, I thought we needed a really difficult and violent parable to shake things up. But really, I’ve committed to the discipline of preaching the lectionary, and this is what we got – but I do believe the Bible is a living Word and the Spirit is able to work in and through the text, so…

Here’s how I wish this story had gone:

A farmer planted a vineyard, then leased the land and went away. But he was invested in the productivity of the land, and wanted to see the vines and his tenants thrive. So, he stayed in touch with his renters, offering support for their farming, resources to buy the equipment they needed. When it came time for the harvest – about five years after planting grapevines, by the way, he sent workers to help cut and crush grapes, so that when the wine was finally done and sealed into jars, there was a great feast to celebrate. The landowner came, and sat at table with the tenants and everyone ate their fill. At the end of the night, they toasted their hard work and said, together – we did this!

Or, what if…it had gone like this:

Farmer planted a vineyard and leased his land, and went away. While he was gone, the tenants labored long and hard, and dreamed of owning the land outright. So when it came time for the harvest, they organized. They pooled their resources, mapped their power, and worked together to negotiate with the landowner. When the servants came to collect the rent, the tenants sought to buy the land – one parcel at a time. When the owner refused to sell, the tenants strategized. They complained to the local government about their absentee landlord, and he was levied with fines for unpaid taxes, and fees. They made signs to draw attention to the landlord’s neglect, and made a campaign on social media calling on people to boycott his wine. When he still refused to sell, they created a land trust, and were able to take over unclaimed land in their region, and grow and plant grapes of their own.

But that’s not how this story goes. It isn’t a story about community building or relational organizing to hold absentee landlords accountable. It’s an allegory about Christ himself, one that Jesus tells to the leaders in the Jerusalem temple as the tension between them reaches a boiling point – right before they conspire to have him arrested and killed so that his messianic uprising doesn’t get out of hand. The allegory is fairly clear: God is the landowner, the religious leaders are the tenants who ignore the prophets and who will soon reject Jesus, condemning him to death.

Why does Jesus tell this awful story? What the heck are we supposed to make of it? First, let’s not make the sad mistake of countless Christians before us and misinterpret the story as one that justifies violence of any kind. Those who would use this parable to explain Anti-Semitic views or violence miss the fact that the gospel writer, Matthew, was Jewish. His community of Christ-believers were Jewish, seeking to differentiate themselves within a broader Jewish community by critiquing their own religious leaders for hoarding resources, collaborating with and benefitting from Roman oppression, and rejecting the ministry of Jesus. This parable is part of the gospel writer’s effort to form the identity of his fledgling faith community…to make sense of violence that has already happened to them and to Christ.

My first or second year in ministry, I made a pilgrimage to the Iona Community. The isle of Iona is a tiny Hebridean island off the western coast of Scotland, where centuries ago monks built a beautiful monastery that became a center for Celtic Christianity. The Iona Community is a more recent development, an ecumenical community committed to peace and justice, the rebuilding of community and the renewal of worship.[1] and I didn’t have a lot of money – I had enough to get there, but not enough to stay there – so instead going to the abbey for a conference, I went to a work week at the Iona Community’s outdoor education center on the isle of Mull. A beautiful, windswept inlet right on the water, Camus is an old quarry – visitors stay in the cold, dark stone dormitories built and used by miners a century ago. My job was to help prepare the garden for spring, turning beds, making paths, planting seedlings, and weeding. My main project during the week, though, was to build an herb spiral. Now if you, like me, have no idea what an herb spiral is, let me illuminate you – it is not bread. It’s an intricately stacked rock wall built into a spiral, filled with soil, so that herbs can be planted in. It creates microclimates for different herbs, providing shade, sun, and drainage at varying amounts. Have you seen rock walls? Some look as if the rocks just fell into place, a satisfying jumble of stone. They are not easy to build. Every single rock has to fit just so with the one underneath. They are precarious if not stacked carefully and solidly. One misplaced stone and the whole wall falls apart.

Scotland in March and April is still chilly – beautiful, but often rainy and a bit cold. So building an herb spiral involved a lot of muddy rock carrying and sorting in the rain, seeking to find the next right rock, the perfect slant or size, to continue the wall. Often a rock that had been tossed aside earlier would work in a different spot. Took a lot of patience, but when I could find a rock that would fit exactly where I needed it to, it was amazing!

When he finishes the parable, Jesus quotes a Psalm, saying – the stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. Now before they were decorative or commemorative, a cornerstone was the first block laid when building a new building. It created the foundation for the structure that was to come  In ancient times, animals were sacrificed on the cornerstone, to ensure a solid and secure structure would be built. In saying this, Jesus was surely alluding to his death and promised resurrection. Remember, he’s speaking to the religious leaders who do not like what he’s preaching. They do not want the temple to be a house of prayer for all people … only for the righteous, those who could afford to abide by the law, therefore only for the wealthy. They do not want folks who are unclean to be welcomed or healed. They do not like the common people getting riled up in the streets, crying out for justice and salvation, drawing the ire and attention of Rome. Of course, they reject Jesus, otherwise they’d have to listen to him, and that might change everything.

The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. Christ’s gospel is the cornerstone – his ministry of healing, love, and justice. His work to embrace the outcast and welcome the stranger, to speak truth to power and serve the poor – on that foundation the church was built.

I am tempted to let this violent, difficult story be bound by its context, to let it be locked in space and time as just a word from Matthew to his community, or to hear it only as a word from Jesus to the ones who would reject him and turn him over to the State to be put to death. Let it teach us about the violence and tensions of that time, but not our own. But, there are more parallels to the violence and tension of this time than I’d like to admit. The specter of violence hangs over this election, with far right-wing white supremacists standing back and standing by to do what, I’m not sure but I don’t want to find out. The violence of more than 400 years of slavery is still reverberating in our country, evident in the brokenness of our criminal justice system, segregation in schools and neighborhoods, racial health and wealth gaps, and visible in the tension and trauma that poured into the streets crying out for racial justice this summer. I could go on. It makes me wonder – how much are we like the religious leaders of Jesus’ time? What voices are challenging us that we don’t want to hear? What healing, peacemaking, community building, justice seeking work do we reject as impossible, too idealistic, too radical, too difficult? Is that the work that Christ might actually be leading us to? What word of hope does this violent parable have in a world where violence is still so prevalent?

Maybe the word of hope is in the landowner who did not give up on the tenants, but sent person after person, even his own child, to intervene and offer them another chance to give back their portion of the harvest. Maybe the word of hope is that the rejection of the religious leaders and the violence of the crucifixion are not the end of the story – that God’s love, and life, and the power of the resurrection actually prevails.  Love wins, not rejection.  Life wins, not death.

Later on, that week on the isle of Mull, I made it to Iona for morning prayer. After the service, I walked round the Abbey and was invited for tea with the Iona volunteers. I’m not sure how it happened, I think they just noticed I was an outsider and made space for me at the table. A table filled with young people from all over the world. They poured tea, and shared scones. And told me about their life and work on Iona, asked me about my work at Camas, how I’d ended up there if I lived in Georgia. It was a small thing, scooting over, making room, making me feel welcome. But it meant the world to me.

Today is world communion Sunday, when we celebrate our unity with Christians all over the globe. A day when we remember that the promised kin-dom of God looks like a feast, a table set with enough food for everyone. Where we scoot over and make room for everyone who shows up. That the feast we celebrate today, and it is one I’m grateful to be part of.

[1] The Iona Community, “Welcome”, https://iona.org.uk