A Woman’s Work Is Never Done!
Rev. Christa Fuller Burns
Faith Presbyterian Church (USA) Baltimore

Luke 18:25-42 – 5 March 2017

First Sunday of Lent

 

The dictionary defines “sanctuary” as 1) a holy place set aside for worship and 2) a place of refuge or protection; originally, fugitives from justice were immune from arrest in churches or other sacred places.

I am guessing most of us are familiar with the idea of church as a place for worship and even refuge from the cares of the world. Indeed, one of the most frequently used arguments against churches taking part in the affairs of the outside world is that the church ought to be a spiritual refuge from the affairs of the world. We may not be so familiar with the idea of church as a place of safety for those in trouble with the law. However, the idea that there should be such places is intrinsic to our identity as people of God. As I pointed out in my Voice of Faith letter, Moses was instructed by God to set apart certain cities of refuge, sanctuary cities, for those in need of a safe place (Numbers 35:15). Through-out it’s history, the church has provided refuge to people in danger. Christians during the Holocaust were simply enacting their faith when they took in Jews in defiance of Hitler’s laws.

God is often described in the Psalms as providing refuge for us: Psalm 91: “You who live in the shelter of the Most High, who abide in the shadow of the Almighty, will say to the Lord, ‘My refuge and my fortress; my god in whom I trust.’ For he will deliver you from the snare of the fowler and from the deadly pestilence; he will cover you with his pinions, and under his wings you will find refuge; his faithfulness is a shield and buckler.” (v 1-4)

The author of Hebrews describes Christ as a high priest who gives us a sanctuary “not made with hands”. ..eternal in the heavens (Hebrews 9:11).

This idea of sanctuary, then, is a foundational one in our faith whether we are talking about a physical place of sanctuary or the sanctuary of the heart, a spiritual sanctuary.

During our Lenten season I would like to explore the meaning of sanctuary, both physical and spiritual. As you may know by now, Susan Minor and I have been attending meetings at St. Matthews Church. A variety of faith communities, the number of which grows each time we meet, are coming together to think about what it means to provide sanctuary for immigrants who are being rounded up by the authorities and detained. What would it mean if Faith declared itself a “Sanctuary Church”?

As I looked at our lectionary for Lent it occurred to me that the stories Jesus told are so often about refuge of one sort or another.

Let’s begin by considering the very familiar story of The Good Samaritan. You know the story. A lawyer comes up to Jesus, as Luke puts it, to test him. He wants to know what he has to do to inherit eternal life. Jesus responds: Well, you know the law. You tell me. The lawyer knows his law and his faith. He answers “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus tells him that he has the right answer. If he can do this, love God with all that he is and his neighbor as himself, he will live.

The lawyer persists and asks Jesus who is his neighbor at which point Jesus tells the story of the Good Samaritan. A man was going down the road from Jerusalem to Jericho when he was stripped, robbed and beaten by a gang. It seems to me, part of the problem with our modern hearing of this story is that it is so familiar. We know the story – not just the Biblical account of the story. We know it because everyday we hear on the news or see on Facebook accounts of people who are robbed and beaten and left for dead. We know this story.When we are daily bombarded with horrific accounts of people left for dead, we run the risk of being the ones who walk by on the other side. After all, there is just so much misery we can take. Maybe we are numb to the story.

And, we also know the part about those who walk by and do nothing because…why? Because we are rushing somewhere and don’t have time? Because we feel inadequate to help? Because it might be dangerous? Because our religious obligations forbid touching someone like that? Our excuses are too numerous to mention.

We know, too, the Samaritans in our world. The Samaritans are not simply those we think of as “other”. They are the enemy. Jews thought Samaritans were something as vile as terrorists. We probably cannot overestimate the antipathy Jews felt toward Samaritans. None the less, Jesus felt the obligation to reach out to them. In chapter 9 of Luke, Jesus sends his messengers into a Samaritan village where they are not met with a welcome committee, to put it mildly. They refused to welcome Jesus and the disciples want to know if Jesus wants that they should command fire to come down from heaven and wipe ‘em all out! Of course, Jesus says no, and they move on.

The Samaritans – they were not just bad neighbors. They were despised. They were hated, which makes Jesus’ telling of this parable all the more remarkable.

The priest walks by. The holy, prestigious Levite walks by. But the hated and despised Samaritan stops. He doesn’t just stop. Moved with pity, he bandages the victim’s wound, he hoists him up on his donkey, and he takes him to an inn where he gives the inn keeper some money and instructions to take care of him.

We know this story…because it is about all of us. At some point, haven’t we found ourselves in the ditch? At some point, haven’t we been the ones who just kept going? At some point, hopefully, were we the ones who stopped and gave refuge to the wounded, the vulnerable, the refugee?

The Good Samaritan, after all, is a story about loving our neighbors to the point where we pick them up out of the ditch and offer them safety. The Good Samaritan is a story about providing sanctuary. The second story we heard this morning is perhaps less clearly about sanctuary.

The story about the two sisters, Mary and Martha, is also familiar. As Jesus and his friends kept going they come to a village where a woman, Martha, welcomes them into her home. That’s about sanctuary isn’t it? Martha provides a safe place that is warm and where there is food for the travelers on their way to Jerusalem. While Martha busily works in the kitchen fixing dinner, her sister Mary sits at Jesus’ feet, listening to what Jesus says. Martha gets upset and wants to know why Jesus doesn’t tell her sister to help her whereupon Jesus says, “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.” (v.41-41)

Traditionally, we women have been asked, “Are you a Mary or a Martha?” Are we the one who keep everything working and in order? Or are we the dreamy one who spends her days in contemplation? I have decided that this choice is unfair and may not have been Jesus’ intended point at all. Perhaps the story about Mary and Martha isn’t about how one role is better than the other. Perhaps it is a story about defending a woman’s right to choose. Martha’s work was traditional for her day, maybe even for ours. The fact that Mary is allowed to sit at Jesus’ feet, to be a student of Jesus was unthinkable in Jesus’ time. It was unthinkable that a woman would be allowed to sit at the teacher’s feet. Jesus defends Mary’s right to choose.

And, what is it that Mary chooses? Howard Thurman, the great American spiritual mentor who we just studied in our adult forum, writes that we have an outer life and an inner sanctuary. Sometimes, he writes, it is hard to know that we are in fact one: the outer life is made up of things we do – our relationships, our work and play, job, people and things. Martha represent an outer life. On the other hand, the inward sanctuary “is the place where I keep my trust with all my meanings and my values. It is the quiet place where the ultimate issues of my life are determined. What I know of myself, my meaning; what I know of God, His meaning; all this, and much more, is made clear in my secret place.” (P.173-4 Meditations of the Heart) Thurman concludes that we need both the outer sanctuary and the inner one because the outer one will have no meaning without the inner one. In other words, we need to be both Martha and Mary – the one who provides physical sanctuary and the one who has the sanctuary within.

I always think of the writer, Frederick Buechner’s story about his father who committed suicide when Buechner was a small boy. Later, Buechner came to realize that, as accomplished and intelligent as he was, his father had no real home within himself. In other words, he had no inner sanctuary, no inner refuge that gave meaning to his life. Or, as the great poet, Billy Joel, put it in his song, And So It Goes: “In every heart there is a room; A sanctuary safe and strong to heal the wounds from lovers past until a new one comes along”. Perhaps that is what Mary found when she sat at Jesus’ feet: A sanctuary safe and strong to heal the wounds.

The fact is that what the Good Samaritan did, what Martha did and what Mary did was all work. There is the work of physically rescuing the person in the ditch. There is the work of making our homes places of welcome. There is the work of tending our inner homes, our sanctuaries of the heart. That work…is never done!

 

The View from Here
Rev. Christa Fuller Burns
Faith Presbyterian Church (USA) Baltimore

Luke 9:28-45 – 26 – February 2017

Transfiguration

What would you say if Jesus came up to you and tapped you on the shoulder and said, “Hey, I’m going to hike up that mountain for some quiet time. You want to go with me?” What would you say?

I, for one, find the suggestion of getting away, finding a quiet place, a change of scenery, very attractive.

This past week-end, I met up with my son Cal for my nephew’s wedding in Texarkana, Texas. Anyone ever been to Texarkana? As Randy will tell you, there is not much in Texarkana – not much at all! Nonetheless, the weekend excursion offered me a welcome change of scene. For one thing, there was no talk of politics at the wedding. In fact, it was kind of like being in a different world – far removed from the daily grind, the bleary bombardment of bad news, the every-present reminders of what is wrong with the world.

It is comforting, is it not, to know that Jesus may have shared our fatigue with worldly worries? After all, Jesus’ daily encounters were with the poor that you have with you always, the demonpossessed and all those despairing women. The woes of the world crowded around Jesus and there was no respite. His feet were covered with the dirt of the world. It must have been oppressive to ever be in demand, to always fell surrounded by hunger and need, to always be reminded of the work to be done as the poet described it:

And all is seared with trade;

bleared, smeared with toil;

And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell;

the soil Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

-(Gerard Manley Hopkins)

Yes, our world too is seared with trade, bleared, smeared with toil. So. If Jesus asks us if we’d like a change of scenery, if we’d like to hike up a mountain, would you stay or would you go?

The fact is, we don’t know why only the three went with Jesus: Peter, John, and James. However, I appreciate the possibility that Jesus simply asked who wanted to go hike to a quiet place where they could pray uninterrupted and they were the ones who agreed.

Of course, the irony is, when the four men get to the top of the mountain, they are interrupted. There are other people up there. Moses and Elijah are up there and, doggone it, they are talking! We never get the idea that much praying happens! Isn’t that the way life so often goes? Our best laid plans are interrupted and what we’d hoped was going to be quiet solitude gets interrupted.

We have to point out that it is not just anybody who is up there on that mountain. It’s none other than Moses and Elijah. They appear just as Jesus has been illuminated – his face shone and his clothes “flashed white like lightening”. Moses and Elijah appeared in heavenly splendor too.

Even this occurrence may seem familiar to us. We are in a place where we think we know what to do. We think we know the place. We are praying, maybe, and we are with people we know and it’s manageable. Something happens that totally changes the way we see things, the way we see ourselves, the way we see Jesus. It may not have been a blinding light… or maybe it was.

One of my favorite short stories is by Flannery O’Connor and it is about a southern woman who is set in her ways. Her world is predictable and she works hard at keeping it that way – nothing to make her upset, nothing out of order. Blacks are in their place and whites are in their place until one day, our of the blue, just as Mrs. Turpin is doing an ordinary thing – visiting a doctor’s office – a young woman has an outburst and throws a book at Mrs. Turpin. When Mrs. Turpin gets home it is if she seeks to put her life back where is should be, predictable. She goes out to feed the pigs and suddenly there is a kind of blinding light and she sees folks in long white robes marching up the heaven….except it is not the way it should be…it is out of order. The people in front of the line are all black! The misfits are also at the front of the line. Mrs. Turpin’s world view is transfigured and her tidy order of things is disrupted.

(Revelation)

“The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil Crushed.”

Sometimes it happens that way…sometimes…if we manage, like Jesus’ friends in the story, to stay awake and we are not overcome by sleep. That is the risk for us, it seems, in these days – when we have the chance to get away and we relax. We catch up on our sleep and we can totally miss the shining like shook foil that has the potential to totally change our view of things…from up here.

Peter and his friends see the shining but they respond in predictable fashion. Jesus, they say, it sure is a good thing we are up here! We can build something to contain this experience. We can manage it. We can make it fit our human expectations or order where everyone is where they should be. We want to do something because that is our way to manage the shining shook from foil.

And, that is when the cloud comes! That is when, I figure, God has to say something. The cloud comes and completely covers everyone on the mountain and you can’t see anything. Have you ever been swallowed up in fog? Maybe you’ve been on a plane and one minute you can see the earth below and the next minute all you can see is the dense, impenetrable whiteness, I grew up in Southern California. We’d be a football game at night watching our team, the Corona Del Mar Sea Kings, and the fog would roll in and you couldn’t see a darn thing! We could hear the whistles blowing but we couldn’t see anything. The amazing thing to me now is that we stayed for the whole game…in the fog. That is High School for you!

It is no wonder then that Jesus’ friends were overcome with awe or fear, as some translations have it. The shining was one thing – they could manage that – or so they thought. The shining. But that cloud, that is a different thing. God is close in the cloud.

My grandmother and I used to have a running debate about where we felt closest to God. My choice was always the ocean. My grandmother on the other hand always went for the mountain…She did have the Bible on her side!

And then….God speaks: “This is my son, my chosen one. Listen to him.” It is one thing to see Jesus – to really see him for who he is. It is another thing to listen to him.

Sadly, the disciples, and we, cannot stay up there on the mountain. We have to come down to the world, which is as we left it. The large crowd is waiting. The epileptic boy needs healing. The disciples either couldn’t or wouldn’t heal him and we are the faithless and crooked generation.

The world is as we left it – still violence-ridden, still rude, still unjust. And Jesus? Jesus will be put to death by this faithless and crooked generation.

It is as if all the shining wore off on the way back down the mountain. All the awe evaporated.

You see, I believe that it wasn’t just Jesus who was transfigured up there on the mountain. What difference would it make if it was just Jesus- like a tree in a forest – and no one saw him? I think Peter, John and James were also changed – they had to be – by the reflected light and the sound of god’s voice.

However, something happened in the descent. Something happened to cause Jesus’ comment on their faithlessness. They lost their shine. They lost their confidence. They lost their vision of who Jesus is. Did they forget what happened and how they felt? Did the misery of the world, like a magic eraser, simply wipe the shine off?

Our task, it seems to me, on this Transfiguration Sunday – the Sunday before we enter the wilderness that is Lent – before we go out into our grimy and hurting world is to remember what we’ve seen and heard. Our task is to look at ourselves in the mirror and see the incandescent light that Jesus gives to us. I am not talking about a cosmetic blush here. I am not talking about simply putting on a happy face. I am talking about shining with the light of truth. I am talking about shining with the light of justice. I am talking about shining with the light of endurance and courage. Our task this morning is to go out into the world….and shine!

It Takes Guts!
Rev. Christa Fuller Burns
Faith Presbyterian Church (USA) Baltimore

Luke 7: 1-17 – 5 February, 2017

Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Many of you know that I have been on an administrative commission for a church in Bel Air. “Administrative commission” is Presbyterian speak for a group of folks who go to be with a church that is split up. Consequently, I find myself driving out to Bel Air, sometimes at odd times; most of the time at night. Now, as you know, we’ve got Faith people who live out that way and who drive in to church all the time. But I am a city girl. You get me out there on those dark roads at night and I feel disoriented and lonely. I mean, Bel Air feels like another state! I am coming to the idea that my little excursions out into the county are teaching me things.

This morning I invite you to think, first of all, about the geography of the two stories we heard this morning. Let’s imagine we are among those who have been walking with Jesus. Our numbers have grown. We’ve pretty much stayed close to home. Jesus is from Galilee, right? His disciples are from Galilee. Galilee is, at the time of Jesus, considered something of a backwater place. It lacks the culture and the commerce and sophistication of the area around Jerusalem, for example.

So far, we’ve been in familiar surroundings, more or less around the Sea of Galilee. We know this place, this land, these people.

When Jesus goes to Capernaum, right there as it is on the lake, it is “our people” he speaks to. We know this place.

However, this time, when we get to Capernaum, after Jesus does his thing teaching, we are met by some Jewish elders who ask him to come to the house of a centurion that is a general in the Roman army who commands a hundred men. The centurion’s slave is gravely ill and he wants Jesus to heal him. We are in a familiar place, but this is not a familiar encounter – a Roman soldier wants Jesus to come to his house? The elders persuade Jesus by telling him that, even though the Romans are hated and despised, even though the Romans are our oppressors, Jesus should go to his house because the guy is a good guy. He loves our people. He even built our synagogue for us.

Jesus, and we, because by this point, where Jesus goes, we go, we start for the centurion’s house. When we are most of the way there, we are met by some of the centurion’s friends who tell Jesus that the centurion feels unworthy to have Jesus come all that way. If he just says the word, his beloved servant will be healed. It is as if the centurion recognizes Jesus’ authority. If you just say the word, he says, healing will happen. Jesus turns around to us and tells us, we who have been following him all along, we who have left our homes and families in order to go all over kingdom come, Jesus turns to us and says, “I tell you, not even in Israel have I found such faith”.

It is stunning. All we can hear is the gentle lapping of the Sea of Galilee in the background; it is such a familiar sound to us. We are in our home turf. We are with our friends; people we know. And Jesus is telling us that this foreigner, this wicked Roman has more faith than we do? All because he tells Jesus that all he has to do is issue a command and his servant will be healed. And who is this servant anyway? Whoever heard of a Roman commander caring that much for an Israelite slave – so much so that he built him a synagogue, so much so that he goes to a Galilean healer man on behalf of his slave? Makes you wonder, doesn’t it? Maybe their relationship is more than meets the eye. Maybe they are more than master and slave. Just thinking. And, this Roman has more faith than we do? Just thinking. The slave, by the way, he is healed.

Soon after this encounter, we leave the familiar and head some twenty or so miles south to a place called Nain…kind of like going from Baltimore to Bel Air. Now, we are out of our comfort zone. Nain is a fair piece from Capernaum. We get to this town, and there is a huge procession coming out of the gates of the town. It is quickly apparent that it is a funeral procession. It seems a widow has lost her only son. It is a heart-wrenching scene – a mother completely bereft. She has nothing. Nothing. There is no future for her. And, she is inconsolable. As the crowd slowly moves toward the rock-hewn tombs on the outskirts of town, Jesus sees this widow. No one else really sees her. After all, it is a common enough sight, a crying mother. But Jesus sees her. Not only that, but Jesus feels for her. He has compassion for her. When we say “compassion”, we are actually using a word that means coming from our gut, wrenching our guts, our innermost selves.

Jesus tells the widow not to cry, at which point the crowd stops moving, and Jesus reaches out and touches the coffin. “Young man”, he says, “I say to you, rise!” The son sits up in that coffin and starts talking! Jesus takes the young man and gives him to his mother. The crowd, as you can imagine, is awe-struck. We are both scared and amazed. What kind of power does this man have that he can heal from a distance and raise a kid from the dead?

Here is what we learn when we walk with Jesus: He takes us out of our comfort zone. He tells us that just because we are baptized, good church folk who are in church on Sunday morning, we don’t necessarily have the faith that someone we may despise has. Oh, my – there are all those people outside this church that are living…faithfully…we’ve got to open our doors to them. Not only that. We have to be open to those who disagree with us; those who define faith differently than us.

William Willimon tells a story about a church that was dying and trying to decide what to do with their church building. They got a new pastor that convinced the church that what they should was just keep the church open to anyone who wanted to come in. And, so they did. They kept the church open all the time and never locked the doors and soon there were regular homeless people who slept there at night and there were people who hung out there during the day because it was warm. However, the insurance people soon warned the church that they could not keep their insurance and not lock the doors. So, the congregation regretfully locked the doors to the church. However, they put the keys under a rock where all could see it. The rock had big bold letters: “KEY”. Don’t you know that church came to life again because it opened itself to the others in its neighborhood!

Second, if we walk with Jesus, we learn something about trusting our gut. In both the story of the centurion and the story of the widow and her son, Jesus had compassion for the plight of otherwise ignored people. I fear one of the things I am seeing in our country today is the inability to feel what another is feeling. We keep hearing that this past election was all about “my” pocketbook, “my” security, “my” job, “my” doctor. Have we lost the ability to feel compassion for the other – that ability to feel from our innermost selves, not what I am feeling, but what the other is feeling – whether it is the steelworker in Ohio or the Syrian child with no place to go? When Jesus tells that story about the folk who pass by the fellow lying in the ditch is he talking about us – the Levite and the priest – the good guys who go to church? And, who is it that has compassion for the robbed and beaten man? A foreigner? A Samaritan? Might as well have been a Roman army officer. If we say we are going to walk with Jesus, if we say that, yes, there is a balm in Gilead, then we are going to have to tell the love of Jesus…and, that is going to take guts!

The Church of the Outstretched Hand
Rev. Christa Fuller Burns
Faith Presbyterian Church (USA) Baltimore

Luke 6:1-16 – 29 January 2017

Fourth Sunday after Epiphany

So, who cares? In our contemporary culture in which anything goes on Sunday and Sunday is simply a day like every other day, who cares about Jesus’ debate over what is the best way of keeping Sabbath? Who cares?

However, those of us of a certain age remember when nothing was open on Sundays, no sports were played on Sundays; families had Sunday dinners on Sundays. If we didn’t actually experience Sunday as different day, my guess is that we remember our grandparents talking about blue laws, and how, in some places, there was no dancing or card playing or anything on Sunday.

Be that as it may, I am not really sure the story about Jesus and his disciples eating grain and healing a man with a withered hand is about keeping Sabbath. Scholars suggest that there are some problems with this passage and that may explain why, until now, it hasn’t been in any of our schedule of readings. We can point out that it is pretty unlikely the Pharisees would have been out in a grain field on the Sabbath. We can also point out that if you were really hungry, eating that grain wouldn’t have been considered a violation of the Sabbath. Healing the man with the withered hand was not work, Jesus doesn’t even touch him, and therefore not an infraction of the rules. We can point out that Jesus, most of the time, was a defender of Sabbath law. In fact, our interpretation of this story and others as about how the Pharisees were out to get Jesus, eventually leading to his death, have contributed to, at least, a distorted view of the Pharisees and, at most, a dangerously anti-Jewish depiction of the Pharisees.

I propose, then, that we think of this passage from Luke, which, by the way, is also included in Matthew and Mark’s gospel, not so much as a run in between Jesus and the Pharisees about how to observe the Sabbath leading us to consider how we observe the Sabbath. I suggest we consider what Jesus says to us about the whole point of religious community. Instead of who cares about the Sabbath, maybe we should be asking who cares about the church, this bunch of people who just happen to get together on Sundays. Who cares…about the church?

After all, everywhere we look, there are those who tell us how obsolete the church is. Our numbers are dwindling. Our voice is fractured, split up as it is over hotly debated issues. Our voice is rarely heard as authoritative or of consequence. No less than the columnist David Brooks suggests that one of the reasons for the moral vacuum in our country these days is that the voice of clergy is no longer heard in the public square. Churches fall all over themselves trying to be relevant, doing away with old hymns, showing videos, praise bands, worshipping in warehouses or in bars, (now that is an idea we maybe should look more closely at). All the while, I fear churches are missing the point.

Jesus is walking with his disciples on the Sabbath. They are walking through a grain field and the disciples start eating the grain they pick from the stalks. I cannot picture this scene without remembering visiting the farm belonging to one of my mother’s friends. I was a child and the farmer invited me to go out early in the morning to help milk the cows. I thought it was magical. I remember filling the buckets with grain to feed the cows and tasting it as I did. It was – well – rather dry and rather oaty and very crunchy. I can imagine that disciples were hungry so they picked off those grains and ate them, tasteless as they must have been.

There was a remarkable story in the paper this week about the death of a survivor of a secret World War II mission. It seems Harold Hayes, who was only 21 at the time, was one of 13 male medics and 13 female nurses who were to have been air-dropped into Italy as the Allied forces were moving into that country to oust Hitler’s army.

A wicked storm blew their plane off course. Eventually, the plane crashed in a rural marsh in Albania. At times, the Americans were given shelter and food by sympathetic Albanians. However, at other times they were unable to find food and they existed by making tea by boiling straw and by eating berries. Miraculously, all of the medics and the nurses survived. We can imagine, then, how life-giving those grains of wheat might have been.

On another Sabbath day, Jesus goes to the synagogue where he teaches. In the synagogue that day was man with a withered hand. To be precise, his right hand was withered which probably meant that he could not work. It also meant that he was unable to fully participate in worship as he would have been ritually unclean. Jesus asks him to come forward. The man stands up and comes forward. Jesus asks, is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the Sabbath, to save life or to destroy it? Jesus pauses, and looks around at the congregation. Then he tells the man to stretch out his hand. When the man does so, his hand is healed. Now he can fully participate in the worship life of his congregation. Now he can be a productive member of his community.

Here is my question this morning: Are we as a church in the business of saving life…or destroying it? Are we in the business of giving life or denying it? This may be the real question of this story.

If we accept the possibility that this story comes from the early church which many argue, it comes from a time when the followers of Jesus were suspected of not being really Jewish. I wonder if that isn’t an argument we have today. What does it mean to really be the church? What does it mean to be really Christian? I was in a conversation just this week with clergy who talked about being under fire for not reciting the Apostles Creed every Sunday or not saying the Lord’s Prayer every Sunday or not singing the Doxology or the Gloria Patri every Sunday. Really? In this time when the church is regarded as irrelevant, are we arguing about not singing the Doxology?

Maybe, just maybe, we as the church should be asking ourselves: Are we destroying life? Or are we giving life?

A fellow pastor tells the story about his church. Their roof had a leak. The church finally fixed the leak with the help of an “architect, a structural engineer, three bids, ten meetings, four subcontractors and a small fortune”. (Matt Fitzgerald, Daily Devotional, Jan.22, ’17) However, even though the leaks stopped, the damage from them remained. Every Sunday, as the pastor looks out at his congregation, he can still see the stains which prompt him to ask himself about the priorities of being church. William Kitt was a homeless man. He’d been homeless for more than 30 years. He was addicted. He was plagued by violent nightmares. He slept in boxes.

On Christmas Eve of 2003 he went to worship in the church with the stains. Sitting under the arched wooden ceiling, something happened to him. ‘I looked around the church and saw the faces of the congregation, from the kids up to the adults. I wanted what they had.’” Soon after that, Mr. Kitt moved into transitional housing where he has a sun-lit apartment. Today he is sober and he makes a living selling his oil paintings. The transformation of Mr. Kitt happened, I would argue, in church…in a church that was life-giving.

My prayer is that Faith Church will be known as the church of the withered hand because, let’s face, aren’t we all people with withered hands? Don’t we all have one infirmity or another? Are any of us truly worthy of the love God has shown us? Aren’t we all refugees of some sort? Aren’t we all afflicted with some sort of suffering? A life-giving church offers healing and acceptance.

I think it is worth noting that the man with the withered hand only has to reach out his hand, to offer who he is, in order to be healed. May we be a place where people are not afraid to offer who they are.

In a recent article entitled “Want millennials Back in the pews? Stop trying to make church ‘cool’” (Rachel Held Evans), the author argues that what brought her back to the church “after years of running away, wasn’t lattes or skinny jeans; it was the sacraments. Baptism, confession, Communion, preaching the Word, anointing the sick – you know, those strange rituals and traditions Christians have been practicing for the past 2,000 years. The sacraments are what make the church relevant, no matter the culture or era.” She doesn’t say it but I think she would agree that the sacraments are important because they are life-giving. Yesterday we thanked God for one of God’s saints, Edith Elliot. Today we will lay our hands on a new leader for our church. These occasions are life-giving. Of course, our sacraments are most important when we offer them to everybody – the man with the withered hand, the left out, the poor, the gay and the lesbian, those of a different race, the immigrant, those otherwise left out in our culture.

I offer an incomplete list of ways that our church can be life-giving. Perhaps you will think of additional ways we can give life. However, today I cannot, leave out this final thought. My Biblical scholar consultant has written a book about Sabbath as resistance in which he argues that “Worship that does not lead to neighborly compassion and justice cannot be faithful worship of YHWH. The offer is a phony Sabbath!” (Walter Brueggemann, Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now )

Have you ever thought about that? That what we do here on Sunday morning is resistance – resistance to a dominant culture of deathly priorities?

On Friday afternoon, Shabbat, a group of suburban synagogue members met at O’Hare International Airport, waiting to meet one of the last Syrian refugee families to be accepted into the US. They waited to welcome, in the warmest way they could, people our country has said it no longer wants. Some of the Jews in the welcome party were the children and grandchildren of refugees – people who had come to this country during the Holocaust in order to find life. The Syrians were arriving on Shabbat. They were also arriving on the International Holocaust Remembrance Day. These Jews were observing the Sabbath by resisting our country’s attitude toward refugees.

Jesus said I came so that you may have life and have it abundantly. Sometimes, giving abundant life means saying “no” to the state and it’s policies of death. Today, January 29, 2017, the world is asking are we the church of the gospel of Jesus Christ…or not? Are we the church of life…or not? Are we the church of the withered hand… or not?