Cat Goodrich
Faith Presbyterian Church, Baltimore, MD
October 21, 2023

What’s Mine is Yours?
Matthew 22:15-22

Gillian, Cocoa and I took a walk yesterday, down our street lined with towering sycamore trees.  The sycamore leaves all turn brown and drop in dry heaps covering the curb, but interspersed through the neighborhood are oaks and maples, sweetgums and dogwoods, chestnuts and black walnuts, trees whose leaves turn the most incredible shades of orange, gold, and crimson, so that the sidewalks become a red carpet.  Some are so beautiful, I can’t walk by without stooping to pick them up.

I’m ashamed to say the magic of fall was a mystery that would pass by almost unnoticed until I had children.  But now, my children ask me – why do leaves change color in fall?  How does it happen?  And I know now that leaves produce chlorophyll through spring and summer, a chemical which tints them a basic green color and allows them to turn sunlight into sugar through photosynthesis.  The sugar feeds the tree.  The chemicals which appear to tint a leaf yellow or gold is called carotenoids, and they’re there, in the leaf, all year – but the chlorophyll covers it up, so the yellow can’t be seen.  As the weather cools, especially if we get bright sunny autumn days and crisp fall nights, and a few rainy days, the leaves have a lot of sugar stored up to feed the tree.  That’s when the chemical that turns leaves bright red and orange begins to be produced; it’s called Anthocyanin.  As the nights grow longer and days shorter, chlorophyll production tapers off – revealing the brilliant yellow and red that have been there all along, and just weren’t visible.[1]  The tender leaves of a tree would freeze if they tried to survive the winter, so they seal up the veins that carry liquid to and from the branch, and eventually, they let go – falling to the ground, carpeting the sidewalks.

The words of Psalm 19 come to mind…”The heavens are telling the glory of God, the earth proclaims Gods handiwork.”  Yes. It’s true.  Look around. Breathe it in. With eyes to see, we people of faith can’t help but recognize the hand of the creator present in the world around us.  How can this be if God is not?  Chlorophyll, carotenoids, and anthocyanin coexisting within a single leaf, each sustaining the tree in its own small way, one stepping forward as another falls back.   And more than that, the wisdom underlying the cycle of our seasons testifies to the wisdom of the creator: this autumn time of letting go, creation hunkering down through the cold winter to rest and build strength, the cycle starting again with the fresh green growth of spring.

We often hear that God created the universe out of nothing.  Earth was a formless void into which God spoke.  But: Celtic Christians believed that God created not out of nothing but out of God’s own being. Imagine the big bang as a birthing, creation born in a flash from the divine body.  Everything is therefore infused with the sacred, because God’s body is the ground of our being.  God’s breath, our breath. Think of the respiration of leaves, as co2 is absorbed and oxygen emitted.  Then their majestic turning, green fading to reveal brilliant flaming colors of fall, readying the tree for winter.  This incredible balance, this beautiful world. This stunning cosmos.  All of it. Of God. From God. Holy.  This means that instead of being far off, out there, or up there, detached from the machinations of our world, God is right here.  MaryAnn McKibben Dana quotes John O’Donohue: “If we believe that the body is in the soul and the soul is divine ground, then the presence of the divine is completely here, close with us.[2] All we need to do is slow down and tune in: to notice the holy at work in the ordinary.[3]  God, not far off, but right here.

And so this question that the Pharisees and the Herodians ask… do we pay taxes to Caesar?  Is it lawful?  This is a sneaky, trick question. It’s a political, partisan question, a question designed to make someone angry no matter what Jesus says: if he says, no, don’t pay it, the Herodians will have reason to arrest him.  But if he says, “Yes, Pay the tax,” both the Pharisees and Jesus’ followers will be furious.  See, the tax was a denarius, about a day’s wages, paid once a year to support the emperor.  So this tax didn’t pay for firefighters or police, it didn’t fund trash collection or pave streets.  It went into the emperor’s coffers, it funded his sacrilegious ostentatious odious occupation of Israel.   And it had to be paid with a coin that had Caesar’s face on it, a graven image they were forbidden by Jewish law to possess.  Sure, Jesus says, give to Caesar what is Caesar.  Let him have his coin.

But then Jesus says, “give to God what is God’s.” If God created the world out of Gods own being.  If the heavens are singing the glory of God, the earth reveals God’s handiwork… then everything – all of creation belongs to God. So all of it is sacred.  Even the coin with Caesar’s face on it.  Everything should be devoted not to Caesar.  Not to our faulty government with its partisan politics and deadlock and decrees.  But to God.

Now many will tell us that this is not true. That religion has its place over here. In here. In here.  That commerce, and governance, and leisure, and business, and learning…. They all exist out there. Keep religion in here.  But out there, pay your taxes.  Look out for yourself, your family, your comfort.  That’s all that matters.  Forget the mystery of the leaves.  The majesty of fall.  The sacramental shimmer that infuses everyday life.

They want us to think that Gods domain is here. Here.  Not out there. Out there, there is technology to demand our devotion, and drugs to numb our aching hearts, and money to be made from fear and hate. Raytheon and Lockheed Martin are churning out bombs and planes, and aircraft carriers. There’s money to be made out there, especially if God stays in here. And here.

But this week I saw a video of a child, a little boy, rescued from the rubble after an airstrike in Gaza.  He was maybe 5 years old, covered in dust.  Hair matted with blood. He was looking around with wide eyes, asking, “am I alive? Am I alive?”[4]

And I read an op-Ed written by an Israeli-American woman, whose child, her son, was kidnapped by Hamas militants two weeks ago.[5]  Taken while fleeing a terrorist attack on a music festival, and she does not know if he is alive or dead.  And she is terrified.  Terrified of what will happen to her son. Her beautiful boy, who loved music.

And on my way here, this morning, I passed by a boy, hood up, hands shoved in his pockets, in the cold. Sitting on a step. Backpack nearby. Waiting for a car to pull up so he could make his next deal.  Just a few blocks from here.

They will tell us there is nothing we can do. These boys are not our problem.  Just let it go.  But how can we?  These children. These boys. They are our children.  How can we allow this to happen? The bombs to fall, the terrorists to terrorize, the hopelessness to spiral into the abyss?

Because in their faces, if we look closely, we will see God’s face. Their bodies: the tear-streaked cheeks, the eyes wide with shock, the shoulders hunched against the cold, they are precious.  Sacred.  Beloved.  The creator’s handiwork.

I don’t have to tell you that our world, God’s creation, is a bit of a mess right now. But I can’t help but wonder what might happen if we stopped to notice, to acknowledge the divine signature all around us.  If we realized that we ourselves, you, and me – each of us owes our being to God.  And our endless bickering, our pointless posturing, our political maneuvering – all of the blood spilled and the children killed to control one tiny corner of our planet for however long … is just a diversion.  Hubris.  Human fault and frailty.

And I wonder what might be possible if we could open our eyes and tune our hearts to see the holy handprint within us, shimmering golden like the carotenoids… right here within us all along.  Just waiting for the green greed of the world to recede, for the cold night to creep in, to inspire us to find a way shine.

Maybe, just maybe when we look to see the face of God in others… when we remember whose image and likeness we bear within our own hearts – maybe we will have the courage to offer to God every possible thing that we can.  Our whole lives.  Our whole selves.  For peace.  For justice.  For those boys.  May it be so.

[1] “The Science of Fall Colors,” USDA Forest Service website, https://www.fs.usda.gov/visit/fall-colors/science-of-fall-colors#:~:text=As%20night%20length%20increases%20in,unmasked%20and%20show%20their%20colors.

[2] John O’Donohue, Aman Cara: A book of Celtic Wisdom qtd by MaryAnn McKibben Dana in her Blue Room newsletter, “The Divine is Close With Us,” 8/25/23

[3] Ibid.

[4] I could not find this video in the writing of this sermon.  I believe it was shared in an Instagram story by Rev. Ashlee Weist-Laird.

[5] Goldberg, Rachel, “I hope someone somewhere is being kind to my boy,” guest essay, The New York Times, 10/12/23, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/12/opinion/israel-hamas-hostage.html

Cat Goodrich
Faith Presbyterian Church, Baltimore, MD
September 30, 2023

A Question of Power… and the Power of Questions
Matthew 21:23-32

Senator Dianne Feinstein died on Friday, a lion of California politics and in the Democratic party.  She was 90 years old and had served in the US. Senate for more than thirty years, the first woman to serve as senator from California.  In her tenure through four Presidents (Biden was the fifth), Feinstein was a champion of gun control and green energy and women’s rights.  As chairperson of the intelligence committee, she oversaw the report that revealed the brutal interrogation techniques CIA operatives used on detainees at Guantanamo Bay in the early years of the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan.  She called that oversight and censure of the CIA and the public release of the torture report (as it came to be known) the most important work of her career.[1]

In recent years, though, the Senator was in declining health, and she appeared to be relying more and more on her staff.  People began to question whether or not she was up to the job.  In the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, Feinstein appeared detached and her questions meandered; she repeated herself more than once – not for emphasis, but because she apparently had forgotten she’d just asked the same question.

Feinstein leaves three octogenarians in the Senate, and 16 who are 75 or older.  I’m sure that these long-serving politicians are very good at their jobs.  But I also have to guess they find it difficult to part with power.  And so they refuse to relinquish it.

In this tense exchange between Jesus and the temple leaders, the leaders are finding it difficult to relinquish their power, too.  Jesus has just paraded into town (literally) and stormed into the temple, tossing tables and throwing out those who would profit from the piety of poor people – the money lenders and venders.  The religious leaders need to get him out of the temple – really, they need him out of the way completely.  Because they are in power, and they want to stay that way.  His antics are threatening.  He attracts the attention of Rome.  And he attracts the attention of the people – the crowds are growing by the day.  Now, if those crowds were all faithful, law abiding Jews, that might be okay, even a good thing.  The problem is that they aren’t upstanding, religious folk – they’re Gentiles and tax collectors, Roman soldiers and prostitutes.  Seriously problematic for the guys in charge to have all of this rabble, these unclean people in their holy space.

So they try to trap Jesus… by asking him a question.  But: Jesus refuses to answer.

Now, the religious leaders should have known better.  They should have known that Jesus was clever, a tricky person to deal with.  After all, he is asked 183 direct questions in the gospels, but he directly answers only 3 of them.  This isn’t one of them.  But he asks more than three hundred questions in his teaching.  In the only story we have of Jesus’s childhood, he has run off to the temple when his parents find him there, he is questioning the rabbis – and the text tells us, all who heard him were amazed.

Anyone who has spent time with a child recently can tell you that kids ask a lot of questions.  Why is the sky blue?  What is the sun made of?  How do birds fly?  What is gravity?  We are born open eyed with wonder, curious about the world around us, intensely interested in understanding how things work and why.  But over time, we stop asking so many questions.  We start to believe we’re supposed to have answers – that asking questions reveals weakness, because it means admitting we don’t know something.  But here is our lord and savior Jesus Christ asking hundreds of questions, and answering only three.

Some people believe that faith means certainty.  I’m not so sure.  Faith can bring knowledge of self, can bring us closer to God, can impart wisdom for living.  But it also brings a whole lot more questions.

Episcopal priest Rev. Paul Kingsley served a church in Towson for decades.  He was remembered for saying, “We go to church to have our questions answered.  Instead, we have our answers questioned.  That clears the decks for having our questions questioned!”

Religion professor Jonathan Malesic has taught college students for more than 20 years.  He wrote an op-ed in the NYTimes earlier this year describing an oft-overlooked quality that leads to academic success in higher education.[2]  Simply put, successful students are willing to learn.  That is, they are open to new ideas and knowledge. They ask questions, and pursue their curiosity.  They do this despite the social and cultural forces that expect us to present ourselves as competent and capable, “always already informed.” Malesic quotes philosopher Jonathan Lear, who calls this attitude knowingness: “a sickness that stands in the way of gaining genuine knowledge… as if there’s too much anxiety involved in simply asking a question and waiting for the world to answer.”[3]

I can’t help but think of Rainer Maria Rilke, who wrote in his Letters to a Young Poet the advice, “have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”[4]

Live the questions now, because that is how you live your way into answers.  That is, in part, what Jesus is doing in this story.  He throws out the money lenders to challenge to the status quo within the temple, where only the wealthy were allowed to worship properly – some were allowed in, but many others were kept out.  He questions the questions of the leaders because they can’t, they refuse to see God’s power – God’s power to heal and reconcile – at work in him and in the world!  Jesus doesn’t teach by sharing clear answers, he teaches by doing! He doesn’t just talk about the kingdom. He enacts it.  By questioning the leaders, by teaching and storytelling, Christ demonstrates his power, holy healing power.  Boundary breaking power.  When the people see Christ’s power, when they realize he’s acting by God’s authority, they are amazed. They’re also afraid.

Afraid, because holy power means that the world as it is is not how it will always be. God is at work, and change is coming -and change is hard. It can be scary. It means that the powers that be, won’t be forever. And people who have power don’t give it up easily.

Before Dianne Feinstein was elected to the Senate, she spent ten years as Mayor of San Francisco, having been appointed to office in the chaotic hours after the assassination of Mayor Moscone and Harvey Milk.  She proved herself to be a brilliant, driven leader, determined to get results to improve the city she loved.  I read that one mark of her leadership was that she cared about details, and spent time each day questioning the department heads about their work – following up on projects, tracking the nuts and bolts minutia of running a city.  Her questions made her a stronger leader.

Questions deepen and strengthen our faith.  It’s why we just spent an hour in the Forum exploring two of our congregation core values: curiosity and doubt.  And so I wonder: What questions do you have?  How can we live them together?

[1] I drew from the New York Times’ coverage of Sen. Feinstein’s life, her obituary, and political career.  Knight, Heather, “As Mayor, Feinstein Made San Francisco ‘Vibrant,’ City Leaders Say,” 9/29/23, The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/14/us/dianne-feinstein-career.html?name=styln-dianne-feinstein&region=TOP_BANNER&block=storyline_menu_recirc&action=click&pgtype=Article&variant=undefined

[2] Malesic, Jonathan, “The Key to Success in College is So Simple, It’s Almost Never Mentioned,” The New York Times, January 3, 2023. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/03/opinion/college-learning-students-success.html?searchResultPosition=2

[3] Ibid.

[4] Rilke, Rainer Maria, Letters to a Young Poet, excerpt accessed on https://www.awakin.org/v2/read/view.php?tid=747

Cat Goodrich
Faith Presbyterian Church, Baltimore, MD
September 24, 2024

What is Fair?
Matthew 20:1-16

It was night when we arrived at the factory gates, and the only light was from the headlights of our car, and those of a truck parked on the road nearby. I remember a crowd of maybe 20-25 people – some older, many younger in their late teens or early 20’s.  They had folding chairs and ice chests, a radio, and some signs – they’d been out there for a while, camped out at the gate of the factory where they worked.  Or, where they had worked until a week before, when the factory owners had closed up shop, shutting down production and closing the plant with no warning, paying no severance.  The workers were there, camped at the gates, to protect the only resource they had left: the sewing machines and other textile equipment in the factory itself, to keep the factory owners from removing them, with the hope of leveraging the machines to negotiate severance.

The United Auto Workers expanded their strike on Friday at two of the big three automakers, in the hope of bringing more serious offers to the negotiation table.  This means that more than 18,000 workers are now on strike seeking higher wages and better benefits, a shorter window for advancement, and assurances of job security as plants shift to making electric vehicles.  They are negotiating in an effort to resist the threat of automation/AI to their jobs and livelihood.

The Writer’s Guild of America has been on strike since spring, negotiating a three-year contract with studio execs that will ensure better benefits and fair pay in a market that has totally been upended by streaming services.  Tens of thousands of people are out of work because of the strike, and production of many TV shows and movies has been halted, too.

Everyone from copy editors to auto workers to Starbucks baristas has gone on strike this year, a movement fueled by rising income inequality, and the end of pandemic protections, among other things.  People are fed up, and they’re fighting back – banding together to seek living wages, reasonable benefits, workplace protections, sick leave and family leave.  Sometimes, it’s clear cut – those workers at the gates of their factory deserved fair notice of the closure and fair severance.  But often, it’s complicated.  What is fair compensation for hard work?  Why do we value some workers more than others?  Why does a public school teacher make less than a UPS driver?

Our parable this morning is confounding, as they often are.  The kingdom of heaven sounds like a pretty unfair place, from this description.  The vineyard owner seems like he’s trying to put one over on his hardest workers.  He pays the same amount to the guys who showed up at the end of the day as the ones who’d been breaking their backs since early morning.  Does that seem fair to you?

I can’t help but wonder if Jesus told this story today, in this year of strikes, would he have told it the same way?  Would the workers who worked all day band together and bring the owner to the negotiation table, demanding just compensation for hours worked, pay based on seniority – definitely more than those guys who showed up at the end of the day?

In our capitalist world, we are conditioned to expect work to be a value exchange.  An hour of work gets an hourly wage.  People are valuable only as much as they are able to produce.  If you can’t work, then you’d better hope for disability, or unemployment, or social security benefits.  But we know that these programs are inadequate, and leave some to fall through the holes in the social safety net.  What about returning citizens who can’t find work because of their criminal record?  What about undocumented people or those awaiting legal status who can’t work because they don’t have the right papers?  Too many people these days say – not my problem.

But.  This story shows us that this is not how God operates.  God is not a capitalist.  The reign of God operates under an economy of grace.  An economy where people have enough to live on, no matter how long or how well they’ve worked.  Where workers are paid a living wage, no matter what.

Are you envious because I am generous? The owner asks. Well, in a word – yeah.

Many cities around the country have experimented over the past few years with universal basic income, including Baltimore.  Last year, Mayor Brandon Scott implemented the Young Families Success Fund, making monthly payments of $1000 to extremely low-income young parents.  The program has allowed participants to afford basics like diapers, child care, and transportation – which means they can actually find and keep a job.  Removing the stress of unpaid bills and the threat of eviction, allows participants to breathe, maybe even save money.

Dary and I were able to buy a house in part because I was given stock as a child by my dad’s parents.  I didn’t do anything to deserve it, or earn it.  I was just lucky to be born into my family of origin, and the fluke of my birth has enabled Dary and me to breathe, and to build wealth, when we sold that house and bought the one we currently live in.  It’s not fair.  It’s just the way things are.  But it doesn’t have to be.  Programs like universal basic income are one way to counteract income inequality wrought by generational wealth.

Now, you may be thinking – I’m being too literal.  Many read this parable as an allegory, seeing God as the vineyard owner and ourselves as the workers, with salvation as the payment that is given.  In this reading, God’s saving grace is lavished on everyone who shows up for it, no matter how late in the game they seek it.  We faithful few who steward the church year in and year out, putting in countless hours of service and giving of our time and resources to keep the lights on and the doors open receive the same measure of grace as those who squeak in the door at the last minute.

When we experience grace – unconditional, boundless love and belonging no matter what – when God meets us in the road and falls at our feet and says welcome home, even when we have squandered our inheritance with our own selfish and foolish ways – when God brushes the tears of shame from our cheeks and sets a place at the table for us, we feel overwhelming gratitude.  Even disbelief.  It’s why we confess our common brokenness, remember, and give thanks God’s grace poured out for us week after week here at our font.  Why tonight and tomorrow as our Jewish siblings celebrate Yom Kippur, they will name their faults and failings and remember and reclaim God’s grace.  The experience of grace is good news!

But when we watch from afar, it can be a different story.  When we with our hands to the plow look up to see God fall at the feet of someone who never showed up for work at all… when God sets the table for someone whose behavior has been shameful – it’s easy to feel resentful.    It’s why I’m grateful that this reading is paired with the story of God providing manna in the wilderness.  This helps me see that to focus on the equal payment of the workers is to miss the point.  The provision of manna redirects our attention, away from payment, toward God’s commitment to provide… in this parable, to provide work for everyone who seeks it.  The good news for us is that when God is in charge, there is enough for everyone – no matter what.

Maybe I’m overly literal.  Maybe our salvation is found in generosity – the abundant grace of God, poured out for all of us, that allows and enables us to be generous and kind with one another – to value people for who they are, not just for how long they’ve been around, or for what they contribute.  To provide a place at the table and enough for absolutely everyone.  No matter what time they show up.

 

 

Cat Goodrich
Faith Presbyterian Church, Baltimore, MD
June 25, 2023

Out of the Frying Pan
Daniel 3:14-27

This past week, many in the world watched, transfixed, as the US Coast Guard led a search for a missing submersible called the Titan: a small, deep diving craft that had taken five people on a tour of the wreckage of the Titanic.  Three of the men had each paid ¼ million dollars for the adventure, despite safety concerns about the vessel – the others were the captain and the 19-year-old young man who was accompanying his father, a Pakistani businessman, on the venture.  The submersible lost contact with the surface a few hours after it began its descent into the ocean – the first indication that something had gone wrong.  The search was carried out over five days, covering an area about twice the size of Connecticut.  Boats, airplanes, helicopters, and drones were deployed to seek to find and save the lost explorers.

It was hard to miss coverage of this tragedy: profiles of the five men were published in newspapers; news channels showed photos and interviewed family members.  A collective gasp could be heard around the world when the Coast Guard announced that debris had been found on the ocean floor, some 1600 yards off the bow of the Titanic.  Experts surmised that the vessel had experienced a catastrophic implosion, killing everyone on board.

The week before last, some 4,000 miles away in the Mediterranean Sea, a fishing boat named the Adriana stalled in the ocean. The boat was making its way from the coast of Libya to the European mainland, and it was perilously overcrowded, with more than 750 Pakistanis, Egyptians, Afghans, and Syrians on board.  The Greek coast guard saw the boat and were monitoring it, but they did not offer assistance – not even when the boat’s engine stalled, and, seven hours later, when it started to sink.  A plane from Frontex, the EU’s border agency, also saw the boat, and offered assistance to Greek authorities, but their offer was ignored.  Eventually, the boat capsized, and officials believe around 700 people drowned.

Now, I have seen no profiles of the people who went down with that boat.  No personal stories of the desperation, poverty, violence, and war that drove them to leave their homes, and to pay their life’s savings to cram onto a boat with no life jackets, risking their lives in search of freedom and safety, a chance to thrive.  There was no breathless, round-the-clock coverage of this disaster, no collective gasp when the boat sank, and 700 people drowned.  Some reports believe that there were as many as one hundred children stuck in the hold of that boat.

Our campfire story this morning is the tale of Shadrach, Mesach, and Abednego – three men who risk their lives to maintain faithfulness to God.  When they refuse to bow down to a statue built by the Babylonian king, he orders them to be thrown into a fiery furnace.  If you grew up going to church, do you remember this story from your childhood Sunday school class?  It’s a story that captured the imagination of many and lodged in our memories …though for the life of me I’m not sure why.  It’s not an uplifting tale, not really.  It’s the story of a self-centered tyrant, foolish and brash, bent on forcing his subjects to worship him.  Maybe we find the names melodic and unusual, that’s why we remember them, re-tell this story.  Somebody renamed the guys Shack, Rack, and Bennie and made it into a Veggie Tale cartoon.  Whatever the reason, I remember this story being told as a cautionary tale, the message being: be faithful to God or risk being burned in a fiery furnace! And even worse: the message – If you fail to be faithful, God will not protect you.

Reading this now, as an adult, I don’t think that’s my take-away anymore.  I’ve seen the damage that fear-based theology to placate a vindictive, jealous God has done to my friends, many of whom have left the church altogether.  Instead, reading this today, I hear the question: What do we worship?  To whom do we give our allegiance, and why does that matter – to us, and to God?

On the surface, that’s an easy question to answer here in our sanctuary.  We worship God, who has created and is creating, who came to us in Jesus, who works in us and others by the Spirit.  But we are here an hour and a half a week.  What do we worship the rest of the time?  Where do we put our energy, in what do we invest our most precious resource – our time, and attention?

The news stories this week – the story of the OceanGate submersible that captured the attention of the world and the Adriana fishing boat that slipped beneath the surface of the Mediterranean and was but a blip on our national radar – tell us a bit about what society worships.  The men in the submersible were newsworthy because they were wealthy.  Thrill seekers painted as heroic explorers.  An adventure kayaker interviewed by the New York Times put it clearly: “…the Titan’s passengers: … ‘Their lives are worth saving.’”[1]  Their deaths are tragic, absolutely, as any person’s is.  But the contrast between the attention paid by the news media to the two stories, and the vast difference between the resources expended to seek to find and rescue the Titan and its five passengers and the blind eye the Greek authorities turned to the crisis off its coast is inexcusable.

I read a story by a journalist who sought to explain that the contrast between the responses is more nuanced than just society’s disregard for poor people.  Our imaginations are captured by stories of unlikely rescues, we are better able to grasp smaller numbers instead of larger ones.  James Cameron surely is already writing the script for the movie about the search for the Titan.  But the truth is that we do value some lives more than others, and as a society we worship wealth.

So how do we resist bowing down to golden idols?  As a refugee advocate said to Amy Goodman of Democracy Now: “Everyone who’s at risk at sea, no matter where they come from, no matter which language they speak, their income, the societies they come from, we have to mobilize all our resources to help them, with no reservations, no “but” or “if”s, and put human life on the very, very top of our priorities, not only words but also with actions. We need solidarity. We need search and rescue. We need safe and legal routes for everyone. And everyone has to be able to look in the eyes of the survivors and see we did what we could do, and this is not going to happen again.”[2]

We must advocate for safe and legal channels for people to escape war and poverty and violence, around the world and at our own borders.  Yes.

Here at home, when we leave here each week, we can pay attention to how we spend our time and energy.  When do we speak up, and for what?  What kind of community are we building for ourselves, for our neighbors, for our children?  As a congregation, we’ve named our core values as compassion and justice, hope and perseverance, creativity and generosity, curiosity and doubt, and diversity, equity, and belonging.  And I hope if you haven’t found a place to connect, to be part of one of our teams and committees discerning how we live these out together, that you’ll find a way to engage, because this is how we live our faith.

The other takeaway is a promise.  Like it or not, each of us will find ourselves in the furnace at some point.  The fire will be hot, and it will threaten to consume us.  I don’t know if your fire will be grief, or addiction, or illness, or loneliness, or depression.  I cannot see our future, I do not know what it will be.  But I do know that you will not be alone.  When you walk through the fire, I will be with you – God promised the people of Israel through this story of Shadrach, Mesach, and Abednego.  And through the voice of the prophet Isaiah.  And that promise is true for us, too.  Let us not be afraid.  Thanks be to God.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/22/us/titanic-submersible-search-rescue-costs.html

[2] Kosmopoulos, Georgios, to Amy goodman on Democracy Now, “As Media Spotlights Titanic Sub, Hundreds of Migrants Who Died in Greek Shipwreck Get Scant Coverage,” 6/23/23, https://www.democracynow.org/2023/6/23/greece_migrant_shipwreck_media_coverage

Cat Goodrich
Faith Presbyterian Church, Baltimore, MD
May 14, 2023

The Unknown God
Acts 17:22-31

If you attended public school as a child, you probably remember taking a standardized test. For kids of my era, state testing was done using long scantron sheets with a hundred rows of bubbles marked ABCD with a number two pencil – multiple choice questions to make it possible for a machine to grade the tests instead of a teacher; standardized assessments to be able to track student progress each year, and compare across schools, cities, and even the country.

Maddie took the MCAP last week – Maryland Comprehensive Assessment Program – the second of two weeks of testing. Instead of a scantron sheet, she took her test on a computer: a sturdy little Chromebook furnished by the Baltimore City Schools. End of year tests for ELA and Math will also be given on her laptop, using apps that tailor the questions to her answers, supposedly giving an accurate assessment of her progress. Technology has changed the way we learn.

If testing has changed over the past few decades, what has happened this year is extraordinary. Professors I know have totally shifted their testing strategies – moving from take home, open book exams to in-class presentations and moving back to blue book tests written out longhand in the classroom. Who can guess why? The rise of AI! Chatbots like ChatGPT mean students have a world of knowledge not just readily accessible – complete essay answers can be generated with one click, essays that may be hard to identify as plagiarized. And sometimes, as with many articles on the internet – the answers sound correct, but they’re riddled with misinformation, slanted with bias, or even just completely wrong. Teachers are wrestling with a core question – how do we know what we know?

As tech companies race to outpace each other in the AI game, scientists and engineers who developed the technology are speaking out, cautioning us to consider the potential misuse and danger of AI, and its implications for job security, misinformation, and … you know, the complete destruction of humanity.

I don’t necessarily understand all of those implications – how different a random language generator is from previous iterations. But I know that colleagues have used the technology to create passable sermons that point toward God and make me wonder if my role, too, might become obsolete. Now, ChatGPT won’t visit you in the hospital, won’t be able to break bread at the table. But call any airline, any customer service department, and it’s hard to find a human to speak with. The change is already here, and part of the ongoing concern is that the technology is evolving and changing so quickly, it’s gone beyond our control and ability to predict and anticipate. It’s troubling.

When Paul arrived in Athens, he travels around the city and observes its people.  Athens was the city of Aristotle and Socrates; the academic, cultural and artistic center of the Roman empire! It was where scholars came to debate the latest ideas; the text tells us that all who lived or visited there spent their time in nothing except the telling or hearing of something new. And everywhere Paul goes, he sees idols – people worshipping a plethora of pagan gods. And to Paul, a man devoted to the One True God, this is troubling. So lacking the tools of TikTok and Substack, he goes down to the town market and begins to engage in friendly debate with passersby, sharing the gospel of Jesus. His arguments intrigue the Athenians, and they want to hear more – so he’s invited to speak to their council at Mars Hill.

Now the mark of a true intellectual in ancient Greece is their keen powers of observation and debate. So Paul plays to his audience. He begins by naming what he has observed in their city – the prevalence of idols. He uplifts the altar to an Unknown God – Then, using their own rhetoric and quotes from their own philosophers, Paul purports to reveal who God is- “what you worship as unknown, I proclaim to you” – then he lays out the case for Jesus. Essentially, Paul asks: “How do we know what we know about God?” – We know, Paul says, because when we seek God, we find them: in creation, in community, in our very selves. And – We know God because of the life and work of the resurrected Christ.

Tertullian, a father of the early church, famously asked “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?”  What do science and philosophy have to do with God’s revelation?  What does the academic pursuit of knowledge have to do with the mystery of faith?  And until Paul shows up in Athens, the answer was – NOTHING.  Willie James Jennings writes that to Athenians, Jerusalem was a closed door.  Pagan Gentiles, with their idol worship and idle philosophizing could never know or be in relationship with the God of Abraham and Sarah.  But Paul arrives and opens the door.  The good news of Jesus Christ is for Jews and Greeks, enslaved and free, male and female – for you and for me, it’s for everyone.

In an op-ed about the new AI technology, a Columbia University professor asks “What would Plato say about ChatGPT?”[1]  Apparently, Plato was suspicious of written language because it would supplant students’ reliance on memory.  Our trepidation about new technologies is as old as time, apparently.  My college chaplain, John Williams, liked to remind us: “God gave us brains and expects us to use them.”  It’s a good rule of thumb.  I think it’s what Paul is reminding the Athenians, and it’s a way to approach new AI technology as well.  Our curiosity about the universe, our ability to learn and assimilate information – is a gift!  The more we know about the world that we live in, the more we appreciate the mystery and complexity of its creator.  The more we understand about the social and political contexts of the early church, the better we can translate the life and teachings of Jesus to our own time.  The more space we make for doubt and questions, to learn and grow, the stronger and more durable our faith becomes.  It is God’s will for us to be seeking and searching – and that is why God makes Godself available for us to find.  The pursuit of knowledge; our capacity to uncover the mysteries of the natural world and the complexities of history and politics; the beauty of poetry and art – the gift of self-expression – are gifts of a loving God, whose revelation is made clear in and through our learning.

The problems that we face in a rapidly changing world are complex.  As people of faith, we can’t shut the door on Athens.  We must follow Paul’s lead and open the door – observe what is happening around us with curiosity and look for how and where God is at work – and using all of the tools at our disposal to join in.  As AI eliminates jobs, that might look like advocating for the right to work and basic human income.  And trusting that God is present and will be found in and through our seeking.  Thanks be to God.

[1] Tufekci, Zeynep, “What Would Plato Say About ChatGPT?” Opinion piece in the New York Times, December 15, 2022.

Cat Goodrich
Faith Presbyterian Church, Baltimore, MD
April 9, 2023

Hope beyond Hope
Matthew 26:1-10

It started with just a little wobble.  The water in the glass on the bedside table sloshed from side to side, like someone had accidentally bumped it.  Maybe people rolled over in bed, changing positions before falling back to sleep.  Some opened their eyes wide, and sat up, adrenaline pumping.  Then, they say, there were three big shakes, windows shattering, bookshelves falling, ceiling crumbling overhead, while the earth rolled for almost a minute.  When it became still, the alarms started to wail – fire alarms, car alarms, ambulances and police – echoing through the city.  People began to make their way into the street, shivering with shock in the cold night air.  Terrified doesn’t begin to describe it.  But then, and this is the amazing thing to me, these people, these survivors – they turned to the houses and apartment buildings up and down their streets, houses and apartments that had collapsed into piles of rubble – people in the pajamas, in absolute shock, with their bare hands, they began to search for other survivors.  They dug through the rubble.  Moved concrete.  One woman who had been trapped up to her neck, buried alive in her own bedroom, was rescued by a neighbor who had nothing but a spoon for digging.[1]

Our news cycle has moved on from the devastating earthquakes that struck Syria and Turkey about 2 months ago.  But if you’ve been paying attention, you know that it was and is an incomprehensible tragedy.  More than 65,000 people were killed in the quake.  Entire towns were obliterated.  Thousands of children orphaned.  More than a million displaced.

An earthquake shakes and breaks; it takes the world as we know it and remakes it in mere minutes into something else entirely, an unrecognizable place.  Those who survive are forever changed, marked by the experience – haunted by it.

Now don’t get me wrong.  Not every quake is catastrophic.  Most aren’t, in fact – any resident of California can tell you that.  Some just unsettle us, reminding us the earth is not as stable as we like to imagine it to be.  It’s an eerie feeling, when the ground shifts under your feet.

In Matthew’s account of the crucifixion and resurrection, the earth itself shakes; first when Christ dies, and then again when the tomb is opened and found to be empty.  Total upheaval, both above and below.   An earthquake shifts the ground at Golgotha, causing the soldiers and the women gathered there to stumble.  Then, an earthquake shakes the ground again three days later, tectonic plates slipping and pushing away anything that would stand in God’s way, moving the stone from the mouth of the tomb.

Matthew tells us the earthquake on Easter is caused by an angel as bright as lightning, who lands and lounges on top of the stone.   Can you picture it?  and the guards, the men posted by Pilate to guard the tomb and protect the body, the guards are frozen with fear.  Terrified doesn’t begin to describe it.  Are they afraid of the earthquake, or the angel?  Both, maybe.  I think I would be too.  Remember that angels often greet people by telling them: Do not be afraid!  So they must be pretty terrifying.

I wonder what the women thought?  Weary and wary, they went as soon as they could to grieve at the grave of their friend.  Surely they were afraid of the soldiers, but their love for Jesus was greater than their fear.  Did they fall to the ground when the earth shook, did they shield their eyes and hide their faces as the angel settled on the stone?  And when they heard him speak, his unbelievable instructions to look in the tomb, to find it empty, and then to go and tell the others that Christ who was crucified has been raised – did they move right away?  Or were they frozen in place, blinking back tears, shivering with shock in the cold morning air?  Eventually they must have moved, screwed their courage to the sticking place and stooped to look, and found – nothing.  No body, even though they’d watched as he’d been laid there just two days prior.

Then, Matthew tells us, they left with fear and great joy, running to tell the others.  Fear and great joy!  Sounds like a description of awe to me – a sense of mystery and wonder at something that we don’t understand.  Somehow, the ground has shifted beneath their feet!  After all, an earthquake shakes and breaks; it takes the world as we know it and remakes it in mere minutes into something else entirely.  We who witness the awesome power of God are forever changed, marked by the experience.  Resurrection!  Could it be true?  Do we dare to believe it?  And if we do, what difference does it make for us?  For the world?

I listened to a conversation between Dacher Keltner and Krista Tippett recently.  Keltner is a neuroscientist at Berkeley, a pioneer in the study of human emotions, who lately has focused on the experience of awe; that is: a sense of mystery and wonder that transcends our understanding, and calms our minds and bodies –  regulating our heartbeats, decreasing cortisol, smoothing out our nervous system, boosting our immune system, and bringing us in sync with those around us.[2]  Through his research, he discovered what causes us to experience awe.  He found that more than anything else; more than being in nature, more than practicing religion, what leads people to feel awe most often is … other people.  Specifically, an experience of the moral beauty of others: kindness, courage, strength, or overcoming obstacles.  When we witness ordinary people doing amazing things, our breath catches in our throats, our eyes tear up.  We are, for a moment, overcome.

I am overcome thinking about the courage of those women, the Marys.  Terrified by the soldiers who killed their friend, shaken by an earthquake, greeted by an angel, and brave enough to run to tell the others what they’ve seen and heard.  In their awe, they meet the risen Christ along the way!  Through their courage, we, too, have witnessed resurrection!  We have seen our Lord!

I am overcome thinking about the survivors in Turkey.  Feet jammed into shoes, jackets thrown over jammies, shivering with shock, yet still digging through rubble with their bare hands to help their neighbors who have been buried alive.  We have witnessed resurrection.

I am overcome thinking about the brave legislators in Tennessee, Representatives Justin Jones, Gloria Johnson, and Justin Pearson.  Have you been paying attention to what’s happening there?  Three representatives protested the legislature’s refusal to act following the school shooting in Nashville, and their colleagues didn’t just censure them – they voted to expel two of them, the two black men, the Justins, from their body completely.  Seeking to silence their advocacy for peace, and preventing their constituents, the people of Memphis, from having representation in the statehouse.  But they will not be silenced.  If anything, their voices have been amplified by what has happened, there is hope yet that schools and neighborhoods might be made safe for children again through common sense gun reform.  Their courage, their refusal to back down has inspired awe.  They are ordinary people doing amazing things.

Ordinary people do amazing things at Faith Church.  You do it all the time.  You care for one another.  Celebrate each other, mark milestones with much rejoicing.  You speak out against violence and keep vigil through the night.  You sing and pray with each other, and for our city, our hurting world.  You share what you have so that others might have enough.  You break bread together and welcome all who are hungry to feast.  You light candles, you double and triple check to make sure they are blown out.  You come early, very early some days, you stay late.  You wash dishes, you clean up, you put out chairs, you break down tables, you carry water, you bring spices to prepare the body.  You sit with each other through grief.  And in doing these things, even if you are sometimes afraid, you are, I hope, sometimes also surprised by joy. And inspired by the courage of those around you.

The good news of this Easter day is that despite the persistence of death, the prevalence of violence, the pain and the suffering of this world, there was a time when death did not win.  When the violence of empire was undone by the tenacity of love.  When the worst thing was not the last thing.  When courageous women and men inspired awe in all who heard and believed and shared the truth of resurrection – the earth shaking power of God to bring forth life from the tomb, to resurrect, to revive, and renew, to remake the world as we know it in an instant.

The old ways of the world are dying, and new ones are being born.  It is awesome.  And I thank God that ordinary people like those women, like you and me, get to be part of it.  And so let’s go, and tell the world: Christ is risen – he is risen indeed.

[1] I read many accounts from survivors in articles from the BBC and World Vision’s coverage of the earthquakes and their aftermath to create this section.

[2] Tippett, Krista interviewing Dacher Keltner in “Dacher Keltner and the Thrilling New Science of Awe,” On Being podcast, 2/2/23, https://onbeing.org/programs/dacher-keltner-the-thrilling-new-science-of-awe/#transcript

Cat Goodrich
Faith Presbyterian Church, Baltimore
April 2, 2023

To the Streets!
Matthew 21:1-11

Hosanna!  Hosanna!  It is ringing in my ears from our joyful parade this morning.  Let’s say it again – Hosanna!  Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!  You probably know that Hosanna is an old Aramaic word that means, “Save us!” or Help us, we pray!

I usually think of parades as joyful events – community convergences, with music and street food, marching bands and kids on shoulders and dogs.  We went to the lantern parade at Patterson Park last fall, and it was happy mayhem – people were carrying lanterns of all shapes and sizes, some purchased but many handmade, interspersed with giant glowing puppets, and people fluttering beautiful lighted butterfly wings, mariachis, kids in wagons, and guys on stilts.  The parade is a celebration of twinkling lights, pushing back at the darkness as the days grew cold and short moving into winter.

But parades aren’t always festive.  Sometimes people go out to the streets to march for change, or to draw attention to a problem that needs collective action.  Sometimes they are public demonstrations of anger, or collective outpourings of grief.  Sometimes, a parade is performance art, or a protest.

Two Fridays ago, the survivors of the Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School shooting went to Washington, D.C.  They weren’t there to see the cherry blossoms, or the memorials or to visit the Smithsonian.  They went to set up a display on the National Mall – 1100 body bags, black on the lawn under overcast skies.  They were protesting the impasse in Congress around gun control – the refusal of Republican legislators to even consider common sense gun laws, despite the fact that firearms are now the leading cause of death for children and youth in this country. The 1100 body bags, lined up on the grass, spell out “Thoughts and Prayers” – Each bag standing for more than 150 people killed by gun violence, so 170,000 total, in the four years since they started their work to call for national gun laws.[1]  Hosanna.

Two years ago, I preached about the March for Our Lives on Palm Sunday, remembering Emma Gonzales holding seven minutes of silence for their fallen classmates.  Hosanna.

Today, they’re on my mind and in my heart again.  Because six people, we know, were shot and killed just last Monday at a private school in Nashville: two teachers, the principal, and three students – one of them a third grader, just the same age as Maddie – 9 years old – a preacher’s kid, too. That tragedy caught national attention, but there were ten people killed on the mean streets of Baltimore in the past two weeks alone.  Hosanna.

The body bag installation calls our attention to the ongoing heartache caused by gun violence in our country.  A largely preventable massacre that demands more than just thoughts and prayers, it demands public action.  Hosanna.

Fred Craddock says that we can understand the Palm Sunday procession, with Jesus making his way into Jerusalem on a donkey, streets lined with cheering peasants, throwing their cloaks and branches into the road- we can understand it in three ways: as a parade, a protest, and a funeral procession.

When a Roman general returned from war, he would charge through the city gates in a chariot led by prancing white horses.  He would lead his garrison of soldiers through the city, directly to the temple to sacrifice to the gods – it was a victory parade that flaunted the military power of Rome in the face of the peasants who were forced to fund it.  Hosanna.

Jesus’s procession turns this tradition upside down.  He enters the city like a conquering hero, and the crowds call him their King… but he arrives on a donkey, just as the prophet Zechariah predicted the savior would come.  When he arrives in Jerusalem he goes straight to the temple – but not to make a sacrifice.  Instead, he goes to throw out the merchants and moneylenders, to protest those who were preying on poor people at the very heart and home of the Jewish community.  Hosanna.  This victory parade is a stunt that provokes the religious leaders, who are already looking for a way to have him killed.

It’s hard to say if this is what his disciples, the ones who called him king, expected him to do.  It’s hard to say if that is what the crowds expected from him, either.  Can you picture them, lining the streets, waiting in the sun to catch a glimpse of him?  I’m sure some came out of curiosity – they’d heard of his miracles and wanted to see who had raised a man from the dead.  Some came for healing, because rumor was he could cast out evil with just a word.  Some came for revolution, because he was the anointed one, who would conquer their oppressors once and for all.  Some came because they’d met him, they’d heard him preach, and they knew he was the savior they’d been waiting for.  They all looked at the man on the donkey and shouted, HOSANNA!  Save us!

This week we remember that their palms and cheers turned to taunts and jeers and a call for crucifixion by Friday.  Hosanna.

It’s not so hard to believe, given how quickly public opinion changes these days.  It’s not so hard to believe, as we live in a Good Friday world, where death is unavoidable.  Where schools aren’t safe, where life is all too fragile, where thoughts and prayers are offered instead of policy and change. Hosanna.

But friends, look around.  Take heart in all those gathered here this morning.  Our witness is important.  Because in the midst of the violence and the pain and the brokenness of our world, Christ came! Christ came with a parade, a protest, a procession, with happy mayhem.  Christ came and shared the love of God our creator; Christ came, and showed us the way out of the graves that we dig for ourselves and into new life.  This week, I invite you to join us as we follow Jesus. We will see his love made real around a table with friends and remember his love even unto death in our service on Thursday night.  The testimony of this holy week is that Jesus does whatever it takes to heal, to save, and to free us from the powers of sin and death.

So I hope today, as we celebrate Bill’s 100 years of life and look back at 100 years of Faith Church’s work and witness, as we move into this holiest of weeks, we’ll ask, what do we expect?  Is our witness a parade?  A celebration of our savior?  Is it a protest, a public demonstration for love and justice in a hurting world?  I hope it’s not a funeral procession for the church that was, but rather a parade heralding the church we are becoming. Today, may we all shout Hosanna: blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.  Hosanna!

[1] https://marchforourlives.com/thoughtsandprayers/

Cat Goodrich
Faith Presbyterian Church, Baltimore, MD
March 26, 2023

Unbound
John 11:1-42

I read an article in the Times this week about a restaurant owner named Sal in Phoenix.  He has been in business for decades, running a successful sandwich shop – a fixture in the neighborhood, with a daily customer base.  The story tells about how he and his business are stressed because all around him, an encampment of people experiencing homelessness has grown, up and down Madison street.  There are more than 1,000 people sleeping outdoors there, some in tents, some just on the street.  Speaking with his wife one morning after opening up the shop, she asks how things are that day.  “The usual chaos and suffering,” he says.  He’s hemmed in by a man-made disaster wrought by the lack of affordable housing, inadequate mental health care, and the opioid crisis.  The article raises many questions – what is a business owner to do when the social fabric unravels around them?  What obligation do we have to care for one another?  What more could or should a city do to address human need on its streets?  Meanwhile, Sal is trapped by the encampment at his doorstep.  His shop is a narrow space of solace in the midst of suffering, and he feels as if he’s stuck in a valley of dry bones.

Ezekiel’s description of exile, of feeling shut off and cut off from God and homeland, resonates with me.  I think we can find those valleys in every city, desolate places where hope is hard to come by in every life. I’ve found myself in a valley like that before, maybe you have, too.  There was a valley like that in Bethany; Mary and Martha were there following the death of their brother Lazarus.

This story of Lazarus is powerful.  It’s a story that turns our attention toward Holy Week, toward the crowds of people who will sing Christ into Jerusalem; sing him all the way to the sham of a trial and execution.  It’s a story that turns our heads and our hearts towards Easter, toward the miracle of resurrection.

But it’s also a story about death.  Because you can’t have resurrection without there first being a death, and death is all around us.  It is in us.  Each moment we’re closer to it.  (Come to church, they said, it’ll be hopeful!)  I know.  It’s a story about death.  And not just some figurative, imagined death.  Death is real in these stories, visceral, with the dry bones rattling and the stench of the body decomposing in the tomb.  Death is as real in these stories as it is in our lives, as real as the names and the memories we carry with us, the losses big and small that have chipped away at our hearts, breaking them over and over again.

Lazarus’s story is not told from a place of triumph.  It’s laden with grief and disappointment. If we listen closely, we can hear the cries of Mary and Martha, their tears, their anger.  Can’t you hear the wails of the mourners tearing the air around the tomb?  The sharp intake of breath as Jesus himself weeps at the grave of his friend?

No, Lazarus’s story is not told from a place of triumph, it is told from the narrow place.  The place of constriction.  From the depths.  There’s a Hebrew term I learned recently, it’s meitzar.  Meitzar literally means the constricted space, a narrow blind spot.  A rabbi describes it as “our own personal Mitzrayim (the Hebrew word for Egypt). Mitzrayim is enslavement, darkness, hopelessness.”[1]  The place where we find ourselves crying out to God.

Mary and Martha are in the narrow place.  They are in a narrow gap between the life that was, and the life that will, eventually, go on.  Meeting Jesus in the road, they are shrouded in grief, empty of hope, angry with him for taking so long to arrive.  Falling to the ground, they cry out from the depths.  Mary and Martha are in the valley of dry bones.

How often have we found ourselves in that narrow place?  Alone, afraid, aggrieved.  Bad news ringing in our ears.  No answers, no clarity about why something terrible has happened, just the knowledge that it has.   What do you do in the valley of dry bones?  What do you do when you find yourself trapped in the meitzar?

I learned that term from an essay written by a mother whose oldest daughter is enduring the indignity of liver cancer.  She writes that through this illness, her family… “[has] been in what rabbis call the meitzar, the biblical narrow place — a place of compression. The meitzar is an expression of all the things that can make life impossibly hard. It appears in Psalm 118: From the narrow place I called to God, the psalm says; I was answered, it continues, from expansiveness. We are constantly seeking moments of that expansiveness, to take a deeper breath.”[2]

If the cry of hopelessness comes from the place of constriction, then God answers from expansiveness.  Hope comes with space to breathe.

It is maddening to Mary and Martha that Jesus doesn’t show up until four days after their brother has died.  Four days, Lazarus is dead in the tomb.  Maddening to me, too.  But I wonder if you have found what Mary and Martha found to be true: it is in the emptiness, in the long and lonesome valley, in the dark sliver of the narrow space – that Christ shows up.  He does.

The more I live, the more I appreciate, I think, that Christ didn’t come before.  He doesn’t stop the bad thing from happening, we all know God doesn’t often intervene that way.  Death still comes, relentlessly, for all of us, as it did for Lazarus, as it will for Jesus, too.

He doesn’t come before. He comes in the empty, hopeless, terrifying after.  He shows up when we fall to our knees in grief and anger to cry out from the depths, from the narrow space – when we ask why?  Why us?  Why this?  Why now?

He doesn’t come with answers; he only offers truth: I am the resurrection and the life, he tells Martha.  God’s work in the world is to move us toward life, to call us to life abundant with dogged persistence, again and again and again.  Yes, Lazarus is dead.  Terrible things will happen.  We will find ourselves awake in the night, with desperation lurking in the shadows.  Apathy and cowardice, greed and lust, and hatred and violence and illness and addiction will continue to stalk human hearts, threatening our lives and our livelihoods.  But still, when we are trapped in the narrow place, hemmed in and hopeless, Christ shows up.  The wind of the spirit will blow the stench of death from the tomb, and we will be able to breathe again.  God will speak a liberating word and our bones will begin to rattle.  With just a word, sinews will form and hearts will swell with something like hope, love, and possibility.  We are remade, stronger even, than before.

Come out, Lazarus, says Jesus, and he emerges.

I wonder… where do you find yourself in this powerful story?  Are you with Mary and Martha, grief stricken, in the narrow place? Are you with Lazarus, trapped in the darkness of a tomb, bound by the deathdealing powers of the world?  Maybe you are with the crowd, doubtful but curious, wanting to helpful to the grieving family, there to offer a helping hand but not sure what to do?  If that’s where you are, remember what Jesus says when Lazarus comes out.  Lazarus is still bound up in his graveclothes, wrapped and trapped by the bindings of death.  “unbind him,” Jesus says, “and let him go.”

Friends, this is the work to which we are called, this work of unbinding.  Liberating ourselves and those around us from the trappings of death, helping us make our way out of the narrow space, into a place of expansiveness.  So that we all can breathe deeply.  Live freely.  Love lavishly.  And continuing to help guide one another from death to new life over and over again.

Sal, the restaurant owner in Phoenix, has a friend down the street.  The friend owns a gallery, and lives above it.  Like Sal, he’s struggled with their new neighbors, the influx of need and increased violence on his doorstep.  But it sounds as if he’s responded as graciously as he could.  Offering care, responding to the people around him with compassion.  The two friends support one another and each day gives them a chance to try again to loosen the bindings they encounter.  Person by person, offering a little more space to breathe.  This   unbinding is the ministry to which we are called.  What might happen in this place, in us, if we offer our hands to do the work of unbinding, to set each other free?

[1] Upbin, Danielle, “Ha-meitzar: Calling to God from the Depths” from Prayer Musings on My Jewish Learning, https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/min-ha-meitzar-calling-to-god-from-the-depths/

[2] Wildman, Sarah, “My Child is in an Impossible Place, and I am There With Her,” Opinion Guest Essay, The New York Times, 2/17/23, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/17/opinion/childhood-cancer-family-conversations.html

Cat Goodrich
Faith Presbyterian Church, Baltimore, MD
February 24, 2023

The Adversary
Matthew 4:1-11

Just over a decade ago, I spent a week working in a garden on the Isle of Mull, off the coast of Scotland in the Hebrides.  The garden was a windswept hill overlooking the sea – on an inlet of granite rocks reaching down into the water.  The place was once an old granite quarry, but it had been turned into Camas, an outdoors center for troubled teens and pilgrims making their way to Iona, a short ferry ride away.  The garden would produce most of the food needed by the camp once it got growing, but as it was early spring, everything had to be brought in from outside – by wheelbarrow pushed over a mile and a half of track laid over beautiful Scottish bog.

Teams took turns cooking meals and washing up, and we were instructed to be careful and frugal with what we made – everything needed to be eaten, nothing wasted.  It was the director’s job to bake the bread that accompanied most dinners.  Eager to be helpful, I offered to bake a no-knead loaf I’d been perfecting that year – my entre into bread.  “No-knead?” he scoffed at me.  “no way.  It won’t be as good.  Good bread takes time – you have to show it some love.  It needs attention.  You’ve got to knead it.”

I didn’t bake the bread.  I know now that even more than kneading, he was right: good bread takes time – and, some attention is a good thing.  The bread that comes from the supermarket, sliced and bagged for sandwiches is easy enough, but it’s completely different from bread baked at home.  It has more in common with a sponge, really.  It might be called wonderbread but it’s pretty far from wonderful.

Is this what Jesus is thinking when he refuses the tempter’s invitation to turn stones into bread?  That a miracle would be too easy?  Just turn the stones to bread? Jesus scoffs.  No way.  Takes the joy out of it.  Good bread takes time, you’ve got to show it some love and really knead it if you want it to be good.  You can take a shortcut to satisfy your hunger, sure – stop at McDonald’s or pick up the Wonderbread – but it won’t be very good for you.  It won’t be delicious.  It won’t be as meaningful as a meal prepared from scratch and shared around the table.

“Stones into bread?  No way,” Jesus says.  We live by the word that gathers us round the table together to eat and celebrate in good company – meals that feed our hearts while filling our bellies, meals that help us remember who and whose we are.

Here at the beginning of Lent, each year we remember this story of Jesus in the wilderness.  These forty days without food, wrestling with temptation, prepare Jesus for ministry – just as forty years in the wilderness prepared and formed the people of Israel from disparate tribes and families enslaved in Egypt into a single nation who trusted in God.  This season gives us, too, forty days to prepare.  Forty days to wrestle with what separates us from each other and from God.  Forty days through which to journey with Christ to Jerusalem, to prepare our hearts and minds for what will happen to him there.

Scripture tells us that after he is baptized by John in the Jordan, with his robes still dripping wet, the Spirit leads Christ out into the desert, where he fasts and prays.  This is a vision quest.  A ritual of purification.  A rite of passage to prepare him for the work ahead.

In his baptism, Jesus hears God claim him as a beloved son.  When the tempter shows up, he questions that identity, saying, “if you are really the son of God, prove it.” Evil tempts Jesus to use his power selfishly by turning stone to bread; to test God by throwing himself off the temple; and to forsake God altogether by seeking earthly power instead of the keys to the kingdom of heaven.

The temptations of the adversary are pernicious.  They would make Jesus settle for small power, self-serving power, power that would satisfy his own immediate needs and ego.  These temptations would make Jesus miss the bigger, selfless, all-encompassing work God was calling him to.  Jesus and his followers were meant to feed the world, not just ourselves – and he goes on to feed five thousand with just a few loaves and fishes.  His ministry was intended to confront and challenge the forces of evil in the world, not to capitulate to them.  He goes on to proclaim that the reign of God had come near in him, to cast out demons and heal brokenness wherever he found it.   And though he would not throw himself from the spire of the temple, he will eventually go willingly to his death, to reveal the truth that violence will never save us, and love always will.

I admit have a hard time with this story, because its depiction of evil personified as the tempter, the adversary, is outside of my experience of sin in the world.  Evil is real – the devil, not so much.  Plenty of people have opened my eyes to their experience of him, though.  In my last call, I shared communion and studied the Bible with women at a shelter each month.  Many of them were survivors of abuse, who wrestled with addiction, and were dealing with the consequences.  Some of them were not that different from me, people who had been dealt a bad hand.  Most of the time, our theologies were very different, but those women taught me more about the adversary than my theology classes ever did.

Living close to the line, every day felt like a battle – the intersecting forces of poverty and racism, addiction and misogyny were not only real, they were personified.  From their perspective, it was the evil doer who was hard at work, opposing them, keeping them from getting ahead.  The adversary made it so that no bus lines ran near the only apartment they could afford, so they couldn’t have a home and make it to their job, so they wouldn’t be able to see their kids again this month.

Though I’m well acquainted with the reality of evil in the world, I’ve never felt it was personally fighting against me and my well-being – but I’ve always had the privilege of housing, and stability, mental health, and employment.  For me, the experience of evil and brokenness is expansive – The way discrimination and white supremacy have been baked into our economic, health, housing, criminal justice, and education systems.  How retributive violence and war seem like a foregone conclusion instead of forgiveness and grace and reconciliation.

But Lent is an invitation to consider evil – that is, all which opposes the will of God for love, peace, and wholeness – as intensely personal as well.  All that is within us that is complicit and complacent with the world as it is, instead of committed to creating the world as we know it should be.  The parts in us that are impatient, unkind, selfish, greedy.  Those tendencies are within us.  We know they are.  And these days of Lent are a chance to reflect on those shortcomings, that inner and outer brokenness, and to recommit ourselves to being the people God would have us be, following Christ in living lives of love and justice.

This season of Lent is an opportunity to remember who we are and to whom we belong.  A chance to deepen our commitment to God by practicing our faith – not by taking shortcuts, but by feasting on the word that truly nourishes us – baking and sharing the bread of life with one another and the world.

 

Cat Goodrich
Faith Presbyterian Church, Baltimore, MD
February 19, 2023

The Lighthouse
Matthew 17

A couple of summers ago, Dary, the girls and I visited the Owl’s Head lighthouse on the Maine coast, near Rockland.  We brought sandwiches and ate them on a picnic blanket in the grass, and the girls clamored around on the giant rocks that made up the shoreline on an inlet nearby.  Once we’d eaten, we climbed a long set of steps to go up to the lighthouse.  It’s not a tall building; a quaint, white brick structure situated on a high bluff overlooking Penobscot Bay.

Inside the lighthouse, a winding staircase, dark and steep, led us up into the light room at the top that held the giant lens – windows all around, of course, and a tremendous view of the sea, rocks jutting out into the water, waves crashing down below.  It must have been July when we were there, because what I remember most was the HEAT – even with a breeze through the open windows – the light reflected and refracted by the lenses was intense, heating the air and shining everywhere you looked, impossible to avoid, bright and HOT.  There is a metal walkway outside all around the room at the top of the light, and I stepped outside and leaned over the railing and breathed the fresh salt air, looking out at the brilliant blue choppy sea, and I can’t really explain it, but I just was overcome with something like awe: amazement at the beauty of the ocean, and gratitude for the devoted men and women who had kept the light burning for so long – since the lighthouse was established in 1825.  The house wasn’t electrified until 1989, so for more than 150 years, a gas flame was tended through short hot summers and long, lonely winters.  How many lives had they saved?  How many ships had they safely steered through the rough waves and treacherous waters?  How many long, impossibly hot summer days and nights had they ensured that the flame continued to shine?

I can’t help but think about that lighthouse when I read this transfiguration story.  Bright, hot, impossible to miss – a beacon shining forth for all to see.  This is the vision of Jesus.  The rational part of my brain is tempted to explain this story somehow, make it make sense, or be more palatable for us 21^st century Christians.  But I don’t really think that’s what we’re meant to do here. This story is important – all three synoptic gospels include it – and we revisit it in one form or another each year the Sunday before the season of Lent begins.  But why?  This vision is miraculous, mysterious, far outside our realm of understanding and belief.  Why is it central to the story of our faith?  What difference does it make for us?

Look around.  This Sunday we stand on the mountaintop together, looking ahead down the path into the valley.  In the weeks to come, we will travel with Jesus and the disciples down from the mountain, making our way through Lent with him along the road to Jerusalem, where danger and death await.  This vision is meant to give us a glimpse of who he really is, to reassure us that the terrible things to come will not be his undoing.

Seeing Jesus’ transformation, Peter, James, and John should have no doubt about who he is: the brilliant radiance of God in human form.  And yet, they seem to have a hard time believing it.  I would, wouldn’t you?  In fact, they’re terrified: the brothers cower on the ground and hide their faces – Peter on the other hand is awestruck – he proposes a building project, perhaps wanting to designate that mountaintop as holy ground.  As if we need an altar to do that.

The word transfiguration itself means a complete change in form or appearance – Jesus the man, transformed into a shining deity.  The message is clear: Christ is both human and holy, divine.  But I don’t know if the disciples are able to comprehend what that means… if having been shown his true identity, shining forth bright and hot, they know what to make of their friend and his teachings.  I wonder, once the vision goes away and the disciples head back down the mountain, what changes for them, having seen this – having heard the voice of God call their friend beloved, and calling them to listen to him.   How does a mountaintop experience – change us?

Mountains are places of mystical encounters – where truth is revealed and perspective is gained.  Moses met God on the mountain, and received rules for living.  The commandments for covenant community.  A mountaintop experience can change how we see the world and our place in it.  The overarching emotion of a mountaintop experience is AWE – “Awe is the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your understanding of the world,” according to a UC Berkley scientist.

Buddhist teacher “Sharon Salzberg defines awe as “the absence of self-preoccupation.”  Moments of awe get us out of our own heads by right-sizing us, helping us “realize our place” in the grand scheme of things.  Awesome feelings help regulate our emotions, deepen our breathing, stimulate the vagal cells around our brainstem.  Awe is good for us! It reconnects us with what is true and gives us new energy with which to go about our work in the valley.

Seeing Jesus shining on the mountain, I can’t help but remember him saying “You are the light of the world,” and his instruction for us to shine our light for all to see.  Bright, and hot.  Impossible to miss.  I remember what one of our bible study folks said as we engaged that text a few weeks ago – her take away was that we should all just let our light shine!  By being ourselves, contributing whatever it is that WE do best.

And so maybe our takeaway from the transfiguration today could be this – 1) embrace awe as a spiritual practice.  Seek it out.  Take the unknown path, make space to encounter that which we cannot explain, beauty that takes our breath away – this is part of the preparation that strengthens us for the journey ahead.  Awe builds our emotional endurance, and it is something we can find when we slow down and take time to notice the world around us with fresh eyes.

2) Christ, who shone like a beacon, hot and bright like a lighthouse guiding ships safely to shore – calls us to shine our light, too.  To be our awesome selves, to contribute whatever it is that makes us come alive, to further his work of peace, love, and justice in our world.  Trust that when you offer what you can, the spark in you glows more brightly.  Shining forth for all to see.  God tells us to listen to him – do not be afraid!  Shine!

We can’t stay on the mountain.  Just like the disciples, we’ve got to go back down, back into the fray.  Peter, James, and John were heading with Jesus towards Jerusalem, into conflict and condemnation, suffering and death, disappointment and grief.  And we are heading out into a broken world with our own faults and frailties, our worries, shame, and doubt.  But awe quiets the voice within, puts our worries in perspective and helps us hear the voice of the one who made us, whose love is strong enough to sustain us through whatever may come – you are beloved.  Let your light shine!  Do not be afraid!