Cat Goodrich
Faith Presbyterian Church, Baltimore, MD
October 31, 2021

What the World Needs Now…
Mark 12:28-34 and Ruth 1:1-18

The man is tall and lanky.  His hair is cut close to the scalp, buzzed short and spiky.  He’s wearing black sweatpants, black face mask, a maroon hoodie.  He sits hunched over in an airport chair, hands in his pockets.  The headline: “Assault on Flight Attendant one of the Worst in Airline’s History.”  It’s a little unclear what caused the fight – but it meant the plane made an emergency landing in Denver, and the man was taken into custody, the flight attendant went to the hospital, and the rest of the passengers and really the nation were left scratching our heads, wondering – what the heck is wrong with us?

There have been more than 4000 reports of unruly passengers on flights so far this year, ¾ of which relate to masks and the refusal to wear them.[1]  Our own Patrick has endured abuse and anger from passengers, simply for doing his job as a flight attendant for Spirit airlines.  And this isn’t just on airplanes – restaurant workers, nurses and hospital staff, teachers, school administrators, and school board members have all seen a rise in bad behavior.  It seems our common life has been struck by an epidemic of rudeness! Disagreements are devolving into physical altercations more often, and arguments are escalating more quickly.  What is going on???

A flurry of articles point to the stress of the pandemic, saying that it’s pushed us into perpetual fight or flight mode.[2] Time alone at home through the mess of the past year and a half has made us more selfish, warped our view of the world.  A steady diet of Facebook and other propaganda has sown division, turned neighbors into enemies, and made us quick to assume the worst of each other.

This is, of course, the opposite of what we are called to do and be as people of faith, as Christ followers.

In this morning’s passage, Jesus and the scribes have been debating for a long while.  The scribes are trying to trap him, to get him to say something for which they can bring him to trial.  But then, something amazing happens: Jesus and a scribe find common ground!  They agree that the Shma – Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord alone.  Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, and strength – this is the first and greatest commandment.  And when Jesus proclaims the primacy of the second, “you shall love your neighbor as yourself,” the scribe agrees with that, too!  You’re right, he says.  Love is primary; it takes precedence over all else.  Love is more important than the law.  More important than temple worship and sacrifices.  Our love for God is to be embodied: in our care for one another, our service, and our common struggle for justice.  We love God because God first loved us; We show our love for God by loving one another.

This is not easy.  Former moderator of the PCUSA Bruce Reyes-Chow often ends worship services with this charge: “Go forth to love God and love your neighbor.  It’s just that easy, and it’s just that difficult.” And he’s right: Love requires reorientation: focusing away from ourselves, looking instead toward others, and seeking their well-being.

But you know what?  I think if we look closely, we will see this kind of love played out every day, all around us – if we only have eyes to see it.  It’s not the kind of story that makes headlines.  It’s often much smaller and quieter than that.  But it’s worth noticing, embracing, holding on to.

When I lived in Guatemala, my family’s land had a few adjacent neighbors.  They weren’t very friendly with the people that lived closest to them.  I can remember one day walking home after running errands with my host mother, Graciela, and my sister Yadira.  Public buses would drop you on the highway, and there was a long walk up the mountain to get home.  A neighbor was walking towards us with a big bucket of corn, on her way to the mill to grind the corn into nixtamal, so that she could use it to make tortillas.  The road was rocky, and something caused the woman to drop the bucket.

Corn went everywhere.

Guatemalans are called people of maize because corn is the cornerstone of their diet.  Their creation story has God creating humans out of an ear of corn.  The corn that this woman dropped was surely going to make tortillas and tamales to feed her family.  Now it was spread out across the road, ruined.

Graciela sat down her basket.  Yadira put down her parcels.  And without a word they stooped down in the dirt and began to help their neighbor pick up her corn.  Every. last. kernel.  Graciela had a fish in the pocket of her apron that she’d intended to fix for supper, and I remember thinking – she needs to get that fish into the refrigerator if I’m going to eat it!  It took a long time.  But they wouldn’t leave her until all of the corn was back in the bucket.  Because that is what they would have wanted someone else to do for them.

Love your neighbor as you love yourself.  This is easy enough to figure out interpersonally, with your actual neighbors.  I see it on my block, with the care we show for one another.  I see it in the nurses and the teachers who keep showing up for work, even though they are exhausted, and overwhelmed by the demands of the past year.  I see it in free community fridges and food deliveries established during the pandemic, neighbors helping neighbors so no one goes hungry.  We’ll see it tonight, as we open our doors to our neighbors again and again, to share treats and celebrate as a community! In their theology of Halloween, the people of The Salt Project proclaim that the holiday shows us “what ‘neighborhood’ actually looks like… what better way to honor the dead, prepare to celebrate the saints, and enter together the darkest time of the year than to embody” love for one another[3] with creative costumes, by opening our doors to everyone and offering and fun size Kit-kats for all?

Love your neighbor as you love yourself.  In some ways it’s easy.  But in our globalized world, it can be a lot harder to figure out how to truly love your neighbor when our neighbors are half a world away, connected through our economic choices, our energy use and its impact on the changing climate, our government’s policies, our shared humanity.

The Christian realist Rienhold Neibuhr, acknowledged this problem, observing that true love of neighbor is virtually impossible, given the complex relationships of modern life.[4]

The TV show The Good Place riffs on this theme, offering a hilarious portrayal of the afterlife where as you might imagine, people end up in the Good Place or the Bad Place.  One of the main characters, Chidi, is an ethicist who is convinced he ended up in the Bad Place because of his love for almond milk.  He knew about the terrible environmental impact of growing almonds, yet he continued to drink it.  Spoiler alert: the main characters discover that these days no one ends up in The Good Place because of how complicated our economic, political, and interpersonal relationships are.

This ethical conundrum means we must rely on God.  Neibuhr says God enters in between the ideal of loving our neighbors and the reality of “clashing wills” that are part of human life.[5]  We need God’s help… to first inspire us see others as beautiful and beloved…made in the image of God.  Then, to enable us to love others as we ourselves want to be loved –those who are different, who are strangers, who are sick, who are sinners – just like you and me.

We see this kind of love in the devotion of Ruth to her mother-in-law, Naomi – commitment which saves both of their lives.  Without a husband or sons to provide for them, widows were vulnerable in the ancient world.  Naomi tries to send Ruth away, back to her people, to unburden Ruth of her ties to an old woman.  And besides, Ruth was a Moabite, her people were despised by Israelites like Naomi.  They shouldn’t even have been in the same family at all.  Yet – Ruth clings to Naomi, and ends up saving her – saving all of us, because Ruth is an ancestor of Christ.

Love your neighbor as you love yourself… it’s just that easy, and it’s just that difficult.  It would be easy enough to retreat, to let the bad news rule the day, to succumb to the epidemic of rudeness and division.  But Christ calls us to love.  And when we risk relying on God to help us love one another… miracles happen.  When we see God in others, we realize everybody is worthy of love and connection – we find healing and reconciliation.  There is suffering and pain and longing for connection all around us.  If we answer God’s call to show up with an open heart, and eyes open to see our neighbors with love, God will make all the rest possible.  It could be the very thing that saves us.

MAY IT BE SO!

Amen.

[1] Muntean, Pete, “Assault on Flight Attendant ‘One of the Worst’ in Airline’s History, American Airlines CEO says,” CNN, 10/28/21, https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/american-airlines-flight-diverted-denver/index.html

[2] Luscombe, Melinda, “Why Everyone Is So Rude Right Now,” Time Magazine, 10/15/21, https://time.com/6099906/rude-customers-pandemic/

[3] A Brief Theology of Halloween, Salt blog from The Salt Project, 10/18/21, https://www.saltproject.org/progressive-christian-blog/theology-of-halloween

[4] Bartlett, David and Barbara Brown Taylor, ed. Feasting on the Word, year B, Volume 4.  Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, p. 264.

[5] Ibid.

Cat Goodrich
Faith Presbyterian Church, Baltimore, MD
October 3, 2021

Created to Love
Mark 10:2-16

Poet Miller Williams wrote a poem called compassion.  It goes something like this:

Have compassion for everyone you meet,
even if they don’t want it. What seems conceit,
bad manners, or cynicism is always a sign
of things no ears have heard, no eyes have seen.
You do not know what wars are going on,
down there where the spirit meets the bone.[1]

Yes.  Lovely isn’t it.  Difficult task.  But if Williams is right, and I think he is, what is Jesus doing here? Why does he say this?

Because I’m fairly confident that whoever you are, wherever you are on life’s journey, you can probably find something wrong with this text.  Something provocative or offensive.  If you’ve lived through a divorce, or love someone who has – you know Jesus is off the mark here.  If you believe in a spectrum of gender expression and identity, and believe that two people who love each other should have the right to marry whatever their gender identity, because love is love is love is love is love, and God is love, then you probably cringed a bit to hear this scripture refer to marriage between a man and a woman.

Why, you may be wondering, would I choose to preach this text at all?  Paula Burger, in Bible study this week, suggested we consider starting the reading at verse 13 – people were bringing children to Jesus so he could bless them, that part, because surely we can all agree on welcoming children.

But you know what?

I reckon this passage has done some damage over the years.  Damage to people who were trapped in loveless or abusive marriages because the church would not permit them to divorce.

Damage to people who escaped broken marriages but carried the weight of guilt or shame with them, in part because of this verse.

Damage to people who didn’t think they could ever marry the person they loved because they couldn’t imagine a day when their family, their community, their church would not just allow it, but bless it.

Damage to far too many.  And I believe God calls us to attend to pain where we find it.  To pay attention.  To listen, to learn.  To share love, to speak life.  At the very least, to do no harm.

I had a theology professor who suggested that our task as students was to mine the tradition in search of gold – those truths that are timeless.  Sometimes, though, that meant we had to blow up tradition completely, if there was nothing useful or true in it anymore.  And I believe this is a passage still worth mining – though some of you may want to borrow some dynamite later on, or a pair of scissors to cut it out of your NRSV.

We have a few mining tools at our disposal.  We can examine the literary context in which the story itself is told.  We can look at the socio-historical context in which Christ was speaking.  So to find some good news in this passage, we must first remember the time when Jesus was teaching.  In the ancient world, women and children had virtually no rights outside of the household.  They were considered property, belonging to the man who was the head of their family, and therefore they were completely reliant upon him for their livelihood.  In our own country, women could not hold a credit card until the 1970’s, some people still don’t trust women to make decisions about our bodies and our health even today.  Still, it’s hard to comprehend just how vulnerable women were in the ancient world – how vulnerable they still are in certain patriarchal cultures today.

Divorce was practiced in the Roman Empire and in Jewish communities in occupied Israel.  But clearly, it was a disputed practice… the Pharisees are trying to trap him with this question.  There is no good answer.  People didn’t agree if it was okay to do or not, or what grounds were sufficient reason for divorce.  There was no “conscious uncoupling.”  Wives could not divorce their husbands – that right belonged only to men.  And in many cases, if the husband found his wife displeasing in some way – if he no longer liked the look of her, or she burned his toast – he could divorce her.  Turn her and her children out on the street, leaving them destitute.  This is the practice that Jesus is opposing.  That cruelty is what he’s condemning.

The passage comes in a series of teachings about serving all people, where he says the last is first in the Kindom of God.  This is just another example of Christ’s concern for vulnerable people!  He also flips the script, shifting the conversation from divorce to marriage.  The Pharisees try to trap him with narrow legalism, asking what the law permits – he responds by uplifting God’s gift of love in creation, and marriage as an expression of that love.  Christ came that we might have life, and have it abundantly!  So a marriage that creates more harm than good is rightly ended![2]

He also talks about divorce in egalitarian terms – something that both partners can initiate.  So maybe he’s being subversive here, suggesting that the more vulnerable partner, the wife in this case, should have a voice.

There was a family in a church that I served, two moms, several high-school aged kids from their previous marriages.  These women and their former spouses and kids had survived much heartache and pain as they came to themselves and to each other. They had not walked an easy road – their courage, and love for themselves and each other was a thing to behold.  They had been married for several years when a younger cousin had a child that she couldn’t care for.  And so these women opened their hearts and their home to him.  When they agreed to be his foster family, they thought it would just be for a few months. It soon became clear that they would adopt him, and so they did.

The boy was precious, precocious, he wore his mamas out with his constant questions and won everyone over with his antics and hilarious commentary on the world. When he was about three, we baptized him.  He was wearing a little sailor suit that had belonged to his big brother.  When I proclaimed that he was baptized in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, he shouted out, YEAH!!! Then he leaned over the font, and splashed in the water, and scooping some up, he baptized himself, and then he baptized me, too.  As the water dripped down my cheeks, and dried on his forehead, we were both blessed: blessed with the knowledge that we are children of God.  Blessed to belong to a community of loving welcome, blessed to be part of God’s family.  The church was blessed with joy and laughter.

The second part of this passage, where Jesus rebukes the disciples for turning away children who come seeking his blessing, and tells his disciples that the kingdom of God belongs to children… that story isn’t separate from his comments about divorce.  And it isn’t telling us to have a simple faith, a faith that accepts things without question.  I mean, have you ever known a child who didn’t ask a thousand questions, who didn’t go through a phase of wondering why, and how, and when, and why again?

No, I believe he is telling us something about God’s presence with and in the least, the lost, and the last.  When we open our arms to care for and protect the vulnerable -children, women in this case – and when we allow ourselves to be vulnerable – to rely on one another, to be honest about our own troubles, what we think and feel and wonder – when we do that, we draw near to the holy within and around us.  So children, in their honesty, their openness, their reliance on others, their vulnerability – children being children, splashing in the baptismal font and shouting with joy when they receive a blessing, children help all of us find our way into the kindom of God.

Which leads me to the PRAYground.

A lot of research has been done by church folks to determine what experiences enable young people build a durable faith, faith that lasts a lifetime and can bear up under the weight of the questions that come from grief, injustice, the pain and wonder of living.

One of the things that makes a difference is regular presence in a worshipping community that not only welcomes them, but also supports their participation and leadership.  By creating a space in our sanctuary especially for children… for kids who might be a little wiggly and need to move around, with chairs and a table that’s just their size, with quiet activities to keep hands busy while ears listen, in a space right up front where little ones can see and hear and be close to what’s happening – we’re saying that children and their grownups are welcome here.  They are not an afterthought.  They are a central part of who we are as a family of Faith!

I know this is going to be a learning process.  We’ll find that some activities work better here than others.  Some kids will be more comfortable here than others – and some parents will too.  There might be a little more movement and noise than we’re used to.  But I trust that the Spirit will be present here, breathing life into this space – as older children mentor younger ones.  As kids feel more welcome in our church.  As we glimpse the kingdom here, breaking forth, right here on Loch Raven.

So will you join me in blessing this space?

Three responses when I raise my hand – please repeat and respond Bless this space, O God; Bless our children, O God; Bless our church, O God.

Bless this space: May it be a place of welcome for our children, where wiggles and giggles are at home and the pencils are always sharp and the crayons exactly the right color. May it inspire deep faith and help us glimpse your kindom.  Bless this space, Bless this space O God.

Bless our children: may they know they are loved, and may they always find welcome here.  Keep them safe, and healthy, enable them to grow in wisdom and stature and joy.  Bless our children: bless our children, O God.

Bless our church: may we be a vibrant witness to the good news of your love to all we meet, and may all people find welcome and be welcome here.  Bless this church, bless this church, O God.

And let all God’s people say: Amen, and amen.

[1] Williams, Miller, “Compassion” in Some Jazz a While, University of Illinois Press: Chicago, 1999, p. 254.

[2] Meyer-Boulton, Matthew, “One Flesh: Salt’s Lectionary Commentary for the Nineteenth Week After Pentecost” The Salt Project blog, 9/28/21, https://www.saltproject.org/progressive-christian-blog/2018/10/3/one-flesh-salts-lectionary-commentary-for-twentieth-week-after-pentecost.