Burning Brightly, All Year Long
A sermon preached by The Rev. Jeffrey A. Geary for the Cornwall Presbyterian Church
on Christmas Eve, December 24, 2022.
Isaiah 9:2, 6-7 Isaiah 11:1-9 Luke 1:26 – 2:20 John 1:1-14
When I was a child, in church, I was an acolyte. As an acolyte, it was my responsibility to light the candles for worship. Before the service began, I would go to the usher’s closet, take a candle lighter – like this one – from its hook on the wall, inspect the wax taper to be sure it was long enough (and replace it if it was not), and then meet my pastor by the sanctuary doors. When the organ prelude began, I would light the candle (with a little Bic lighter) and I would walk, side by side with my pastor, down the center aisle. I was proud to walk beside my pastor, but I learned to pay attention because there were so many ways for the candle to go out. I learned to walk slowly, with one hand cupped in front of the tiny flame, lest the flame blow out, and the thumb of my other hand on this little lever here to push the wax taper up lest the flame be snuffed out. I would first light the Christ Candle on its table, and then the candles in the candelabras. During the service the acolyte had a reserved seat in the front pew.
At the end of the service, when the postlude began, I would come forward again and extinguish the candles in the candelabras with the bell, or candlesnuffer, working in reverse order, and then move back to the communion table. There, I would take the flame from the Christ Candle and bring it back to my taper before extinguishing the candle. And with my pastor I would walk the flame back down the aisle and out of the sanctuary.
This ritual of candle and flame was an important part of my experience of worship as a child. It shaped in me a respect for the sacred; that sensing the sacred required attention and care (and practice). How I entered the sanctuary mattered. If I entered worship too quickly or thoughtlessly, the candle would go out. If I paid attention too much attention to myself, or to others, or to others paying attention to me, I might forget to raise the taper, and the flame would go out. I must be on time, or something crucial would be lost for everyone.
I don’t remember what age I was when I began to feel uncomfortable with blowing out the taper after leaving the sanctuary. This flame, after all, had been a part of our worship, had helped the entire congregation focus on why we were together. We hoped that God would meet us, speak to us, guide us, comfort and challenge us – hopes as fragile as the flame. Simply blowing it out felt wrong, until, the day, that is, that I realized that we are to bear this light in our lives when we leave the sanctuary.
Luke emphasizes that God becoming flesh shows us Emmanuel, God-with-us, as one-of-us. But the incarnation also shows us ourselves, as we can be, as we should be, as we were meant to be. But we had forgotten. So Christ helps us remember.
In John’s gospel, light becomes the metaphor for God-with-us, especially in the darkest times. Receiving Jesus, the light of the world, and bearing our light, not hiding it under a bushel, is the movement of salvation. The light is God’s love which meets the world’s suffering, which comprehends and rights injustice. It is in this love and from this love and by this love and for this love, that we were created with inherent dignity – which becomes effective and real as we trust this love, emulate this love, and walk together in love.” It is why we are here.
When our worship rituals here are done tonight, when we have read and prayed and meditated, lit our individual candles, sung Silent Night and received God’s blessing, our bulletin says that we will extinguish our candles. But is also says, this year, that in doing so we will light a candle of fellowship. That’s you!
The Rev. Dr. Howard Thurman was a Christian mystic, an activist, scholar, and mentor to many in the Civil Rights movement. He was also pastor of one of the first intentionally interracial congregations in the country. Of his many writings, memoirs, sermons, and poems, that have nurtured my own sense of my place in the world, this passage from his book The Mood of Christmas has always spoken to the young acolyte in me. He writes,
I will light the candle of fellowship this Christmas. I know that the experiences of unity in human relations are more compelling than the concepts, the fears, the prejudices, which divide. Despite the tendency to feel my race superior, my nation the greatest nation, my faith the true faith, I must beat down the boundaries of my exclusiveness until my sense of separateness is completely involved in a sense of fellowship. There must be free and easy access by all, to all the rich resources accumulated by groups and individuals in years of living and experiencing. I will light the candle of fellowship this Christmas, a candle that must burn all the year long.[1]
This is the invitation and call of Christmas: the light of this night must burn brightly all year. This night of quiet reflection before the great mystery of life and love and joy and peace, must extend into our living, our discipleship, our following and following up. We must follow the light, follow up on this night, by bringing light to the world.
[1] Howard Thurman, The Mood of Christmas. (Richmond, 1973). p. 19.
The Hope in Each Encounter
A sermon preached by The Rev. Jeffrey A. Geary for the Cornwall Presbyterian Church
on the Third Sunday of Advent, Joy Sunday, December 11, 2022.
Isaiah 35:1-10. Luke 1:39-56
What a joy it is to be here with you! And how fitting it is that this is Joy Sunday in the Season of Advent, a time of new hope and fresh expectation.
I have had a delightful week settling into life here in Cornwall.
I came in to meet Robin last Friday, who I had met briefly when I preached for you in November. She greeted me with a set of keys for the church and the office and a directory of members and friends. While she was on vacation thisweek, Lori R. filled in, which gave the two of us an opportunity to get to know one another as pastor and clerk, with a lot of laughter as I expressed curiosity about everything Cornwall. Pat P. was eager to meet me as soon as I arrivedwith her warm smile – and a hug! We sat together in my office where she dubbed my stuffed animals “my staff” (you’ll get to meet them in good time) and shared with me how she has filled the role of pastoral care coordinator these past several months. And she directed me to those with whom I might make my first pastoral calls.
Phil welcomed me with a strong handshake and then proceeded to fill my phone with all the numbers I might need on hand “in case of emergency.” And he taught me how to light the pilot lights in the stove, because I’ve been thinking about making chili and gathering people for informal conversation. Nancy stopped in and invited me out to her home, where I hope to join her in collecting the eggs from the chickens one day. Laurie and Susan described the Backpacks for Food program to me. Ginny and Melanie, recovered from the Apple Time Festival, opened all the crafting closets downstairs and explained how they contribute to various mission efforts. And it was like this each day, a busy building. I met Santa with the nursery school children on Thursday, was given a driving tour of both town and village, applied for my library card, and even popped in to meet the choir after attending the Village Holiday Party.
It’s been a full week.
This morning, I am drawn to the prophet’s powerful picture of the world made right, and how beautiful God’s justice is. Did you notice that? There is joy and beauty in seeing God working for justice in the world. There is reason to celebrate and sing as we experience the coming-to-be of God’s promises. And those promises are of life – new life, life restored, life-in-the-midst-of-death. Humanity, according to Isaiah, has been disabled, unable to live the abundant life God intends for us. We have “weak hands” and “feeble knees” and above all “fearful hearts.” Isaiah acknowledges that we are often overwhelmed by fear, timidity, vulnerability, and lack of courage. But when the good news of God’s coming is spoken, the impact is immediate and dramatic: the blind see, the deaf hear, the lame walk, the mute sing. And this new life is not just for human beings, but also equally for all creatures and the land itself. God’s people know joy and gladness. The land, the desert, and the blossoming crocus, know joy and gladness. And all, together, sing.[1]
In the gospel, Mary too sings, but of an empire turned upside down, just as we did moments ago. And she sings it from the midst of her own world having been turned upside down.
When Mary finds herself pregnant, she is hustled off to relatives up in the hill country of Judea, far from Galilee, far from prying eyes and gossip. Far from the home she knew and her betrothed Joseph.
Elizabeth was a relative, but there is no reason to believe the two women knew one another. What does this young, perhaps frightened, very young girl say to her much older relative? How does she explain the circumstances of her visit? What does she share about herself? And how will it be received? In Matthew’s gospel we know that Joseph embraced Mary’s pregnancy, even though they were not yet married, but we cannot forget how vulnerable it has made her, with her future husband. Joseph had the right to privately break off the engagement and publicly shame her. Which means there’s no doubt that Mary experienced shame, whether deserved or not. Travelling to the hill country of Judea, Mary has been separated from her home and her immediate family, her mother, her father, and all close kin. Is she lonely? Is she grieving the separation from her family?
Or is she afraid? Luke describes Elizabeth and her husband Zechariah as righteous before God, living blamelessly according to all the commandments and regulations of God. Will she encounter judgement? Can she possibly hope for acceptance? Understanding?
Elizabeth, too, by grace, is pregnant, about six months along even though she is described as “getting on in years.” Can Mary possibly find in her the wisdom of an older and trustworthy woman as they contemplate how these babies will radically change their lives?
I am captured by all the risks and possibilities involved when strangers meet. You do not know, when you intend or are invited to share something intimate, how it will be received. Whether it will be honored. What healing and new life might be made possible.
Elizabeth and Mary were well met. Elizabeth created space from Mary, and Mary was able to share all that she knew, and feared, and hoped on account of what the angel had told her. However she did this, whatever the greeting was that Mary offered, there was a response from within Elizabeth. The child-to-be in her womb leaped, and Elizabeth opens herself to her relative, “Who am I that you come to me?” And Mary sings her amazing Magnificat.
There is a call-and-response greeting that comes from the African concept of ubuntu, meaning shared humanity, that goes like this: “I see you.” To which the response is, if one truly feels seen, “I am here.” Or “we are here.” The idea is that “until you see me, I do not exist.” Of course, this may also be said with intention and promise. I see you; I will attend to you, listen to you, respect you, and make every effort to understand you. The ball is in your court. The response, I am here, can also be spoken with intention and promise. And I will share myself with you. I will be honest, and real. What I will show you is me, not a mask. It’s a ritual we might put in the practice for a little while, as we get to know one another.
And, of course, like any ritual, it can be used well and be beautiful, but it can also be used poorly and as a weapon. “I see you,” can mean I have labeled you, packaged you, put you in a box, made my own judgments or prejudgments about you, rather than truly encountering you.[2] In Mexico, Latin America and the Caribbean, people speak of an encuentro, translated, not adequately into English, as an encounter. It means to truly meet – to attend to one another, to see and to be seen.
This is what Elizabeth and Mary experience together. A true meeting, that is beautiful to behold.
I’m looking forward to lots of opportunities to meet each of you and to get to know you. And I am looking forward to learning more about how you see yourselves as a collective body – the church – in this place. Who do you sense God calling you to be? What do you sense God calling this church to do?
As I shared with your session during the search process, an interim pastor is a temporary pastor working with a congregation in a time of transition. I will listen to you, and work with you as you articulate a shared sense of who you are and where God is calling you. If there is anything that needs to be worked out or left behind as you face the future, we will do that too, of course. All this is so that you have clarity as you prepare to call your next settled pastor.
I plan to be in Cornwall for very long days on Tuesdays and Thursdays (generally) as well as each Sunday. “Weather permitting,” I am learning to add, as I’ve been told to avoid Storm King Mountain after dark in the winter, so I am already plotting alternate routes home in light of today’s already falling snow. And as a way for me to start listening and learning, let me put this out there: I would welcome invitations to dinner or coffee while I am here. I understand plans are afoot to resume meals at the church when the time is right.
Whether we meet in a home, a coffee house, or in worship, the greatest gift we bring to one another is the gift of allowing ourselves to be known by one other and by God. That process of allowing ourselves to be revealed, is itself a process of renewal.
For many years I would begin my annual confirmation class with the reading of a poem about what we bring when we come to worship or to any place where we hope to truly encounter one another. I will end, or perhaps I should say, we will begin, with this:
What We Bring to Worship “In This Hour”
(from the UCC Office for Church Life and used in First United Quest classes)
I always bring me
sometimes happy, sometimes sad
sometimes rushed, sometimes bored
sometimes despairing, sometimes hopeful
sometimes anxious, sometimes content
I always bring me
You always bring you
sometimes confident, sometimes scared
sometimes silly, sometimes serious
sometimes guilty, sometimes
forgiven sometimes open,
sometimes closed
You always bring you
I always bring me, and you always bring you
the real me, the real you
wonderful
imperfect
warm
callous
broken
whole
worthy
unworthy
the real me, the real you
I always bring me, you always bring you
And together
we hear the Word
speak words of faith
eat the Bread
drink from the Cup
confess our sins
hear assuring words
pray for others
pray for ourselves
give thanks to God
are thankful for each other
What we bring is made new
when I bring me, the real me
you bring you, the real you
when we bring ourselves
with each other before God in worship
and give what we bring, to God
who makes it new.
[1] On beauty, see the Monica Coleman in Preaching God’s Transforming Justice: A Lectionary Commentary, Year A, Featuring 22 New Holy Days for Justice, edited by Dawn Ottoni-Wilhelm, et al. (WJK 2013). On those emotionally and spiritually dis-abled by life, see Walter Brueggemann in Texts for Preaching: A Lectionary Commentary Based on the NRSV – Year A edited by Brueggemann, et al. (WJK 1995).
[2] As when Principal Larissa Weems (portrayed by Gwendoline Christie) says to Wednesday (Jenna Ortega), as accusation and threat, “I may not have hard evidence, but I see you. You’re a trouble magnet.” Tim Burton’s Wednesday (2022), Episode 3: Friend or Woe.
Scars in the Afterlife
Scars in the Afterlife[1]
A sermon preached by the Rev. Jeffrey A. Geary for the White Plains Presbyterian Church on the Third Sunday of Easter, May 1, 2022. We are currently following Lectionary Year W, A Women’s Lectionary for the Whole Church, created by the Rev. Dr. Wilda C. Gafney.
Deuteronomy 5:11-22 Psalm 78: 1-7 Romans 13:8-10 Matthew 22:23-33
+ + + + + +
The question put to Jesus by the Sadducees is part of the debates Jesus held with religious authorities in the temple during holy week. The question is a trap, though perhaps not the trap we think it is. Jesus has spoken about the resurrection, or the age of resurrection, or the age inaugurated by resurrection, and the Sadducees do not believe in the resurrection, so they ask Jesus about marriage. There was a custom called Levirate marriage. If a man dies childless, his nearest male relative is obligated to marry the widow, both as a means of providing for her (this is one way to provide for widows) and as a way of providing an heir for the family. So the Sadducees imagine this happens seven times with one woman. Who, they want to know, will she belong to in the age to come?
Do you see the trap? On the surface, the Sadducees ask Jesus to talk about resurrection, which they don’t believe in, but that is simply mockery. What they really want him to talk about is gender equality, or rather gender inequality, which they do believe in, and which they are much more invested in. Notice how they put it to Jesus – to whom will she be wife? To whom will she belong? We’re not talking about love here, but property.
The Sadducees were not official religious leaders, they were a propertied class with strong opinions. Property is important, as is inheritance, thus the question about ownership and belonging.
It’s not hard to see, if you look, that the early Jesus movement featured, on the other hand, an unusual equality between men and women and willingness to both share and give away property. The apostle Paul leaned into this, “there is neither male or female, slave or free, Jew or Gentile, but we are all one in Christ” (Galatians 3:28). And this was taken seriously. Paul wrote a strongly worded letter to a slave-owning follower of Jesus, urging emancipation. In many of the communities Paul was a part of, young girls embraced the freedom not to marry, men and women ended their marriages – an acknowledgement both that marriage involved male privilege and a recognition of mutual equality. Married women stopped wearing to social symbols of marriage, like head covering. To outsiders this looked like chaos, but to follows of Jesus, this was freedom in Christ.[2]
Paul’s movement, before it was undermined, was known for strong women leaders, Jew and Gentile alike, and often criticized for it by folks like the Sadducees.[3] You see, the privileged (like the Sadducees) could only imagine their privileges continuing in the afterlife, or in the coming age. (Talk of resurrection seems to appeal to both). And Jesus had this pesky habit of praying for things to be on earth as they are in heaven. So which is it, they want to know, that you, Jesus, aspire to?
Jesus, with a brilliance we don’t need to analyze today, citing scripture particularly treasured by the Sadducees, suggests they don’t know their scripture half as well as they think, that in the resurrection we will be like angels. There will not be marrying or being given in marriage. (Notice how Jesus addresses the experience of both men and women – there will be neither marrying nor being given in marriage). To practice resurrection is the end of all human hierarchies and privileges, and a radical equality, in Christ.
And the scripture says “all were astounded at his teaching.”
Thus endeth the lesson.
Now I want to use this story of the Sadducees to ask a question of my own, and to invite a little imagining. My spiritual practice during this Easter season has been to meditate on the wounds of Jesus (and others). To hold the incarnation and the resurrection of the body together. Which means attending to the experience of the body in the world, the touch of skin, the wounding of skin, the sensuality of skin, the scarring of skin. And to imagine what it would mean to embody resurrection.
Today I want to talk about scars.
Scars are a record of our experience of the world, or at least certain experiences that have left a mark upon us. I have a scar right here (pointing on my left index finger). It is actually three scars: a scar atop a scar atop a scar. I got the first scar during a father and son Boy Scout camping trip. I had a new Boy Scout pocketknife and was whittling on a stick. But against all advice, I was steadying the stick with my outstretched finger, and cut it like this (demonstrating). My father took care of cleaning and bandaging the cut. The second cut was deeper. It occurred on Thanksgiving Day as I was trying to remove a jammed blade from an electric carving knife, like this (demonstrating). My mom took me to the emergency room to have this one stitched up. The third cut took place while I was working as an electrician, changing light fixtures in the library ceiling of a middle school. The fixture I was working on had a metal burr, or sliver of metal, that needed removing, and I (stupidly) reached up to pull it off with my ungloved hand rather than with my pliers, like this (making a slicing sound).
Some scars reflect medical procedures, a caesarean section, heart surgery; scars can reflect joyful or lifesaving procedures, others can reflect painful incidents or accidents. And there are of course the scars that do not leave marks but are borne inside; traumas are scars, which we can talk about another time.
Theologian Shelly Rambo, in her book Resurrecting Wounds, has put it this way: “So, as we live, as our soft, vulnerable bodies knock around the world of sharp edges, our skin accumulates its own idiosyncratic scars and folds from exposure to the walls and trees of our childhood, the surgeon’s knife, the machines we get caught in, the weapons wielded against us, the sun.”[4]
I would also point out that that there is a scar we all have in common: “we share with all humans and almost all mammals the umbilical scar,” [what Irish philosopher Richard Kearney calls] “our first scar, the mother of all scars.”[5]
Today I want to use the gospel story message jumping off place to ask if there will be scars in the age of resurrection? Do scars have an afterlife? Do bodies when they rise, even if they rise as what Paul calls spiritual bodies, do they still have scars?[6] I find it hard imagine a body being my body without them. Scars are so unique and so much a part of our identity that they are often used forensically to identify bodies. Remember our reading last week when Jesus wanted to show his disciples his wounds, and invited Thomas to touch them? In the gospel of Luke, the risen Jesus says “I am not a ghost. I am flesh and blood” (Luke 24:39). And he bore his scars. Scars are both mine, but not wholly mine, as they record my experience of the world.
At this point I invited the congregation to break into small groups of at least three, keeping whatever distance they felt was appropriate, and to share stories of scars they bear. This is one of my favorite “icebreakers” for groups getting to know one another. We spent a good while doing this, and I heard some pretty amazing stories, stories of congregants’ lives I would probably have never learned another way. There was a definite feeling of being seen by one another. We ended our time by saying aloud, “Thank you for sharing. I honor your story.”
We then sang, “Jesu, Jesu, Fill Us With Your Love,” a song about foot washing and care for neighbor, as we prepared to come to the table of grace.
[1] This is the title of the third section of Shelly Rambo’s essay “Refiguring Wounds in the Afterlife (of Trauma)” in Carnal Hermeneutics. Perspectives in Continental Philosophy, edited by Richard Kearney and Brian Treanor. (Fordham, 2015).
[2] See the new, must read After Jesus Before Christianity: A Historical Exploration of the First Two Centuries of Jesus Movements. Edited by erin K. Verncombe, Bernard Brandon Scott and Hal Taussig for the Westar Christianity Seminar. (HarperOne, 2021). Especially Chapters 7 (Testing Gender, Testing Boundaries), 8 (Forming New Identities Through Gender), and 10 (Experimental Families). See also the second century Acts of Paul and Thecla in The New, New Testament: A Bible for the Twenty-First Century Combining Traditional and Newly Discovered Texts. Edited by Hal Taussig. One might also look at The Gospel of Mary and The Gospel of Philip.
[3] Verncombe, After Jesus Before Christianity, chapter 15 (Paul Obscured).
[4] Shelly Rambo, Resurrecting Wounds: Living in the Aftermath of Trauma. (2018). p. 184.
[5] Richard Kearney, Touch: Recovering Our Most Vital Sense. (Columbia, 2021). See also Anne O’Bryne, “Umbilicus: Toward a Hermeneutics of Generational Difference” in Carnal Hermeneutics. Perspectives in Continental Philosophy, edited by Richard Kearney and Brian Treanor. (Fordham, 2015).
[6] I am, of course, employing and inviting imagination about scars and identity and the significance of our wounds, to envision a coming age in which we can tend to our individual and corporate scars, rather than ignoring them. I am not making statements about afterlife. The magisterial study of historical theologies and social imaginaries of resurrection is Carolyn Walker Bynum’s The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity 200-1336. (Columbia, 1995).
Touching Wounds – Healing Thomas
A sermon preached by the Rev. Jeffrey A. Geary for the White Plains Presbyterian Church on the Second Sunday of Easter, April 24, 2022. We are currently following Lectionary Year W, A Women’s Lectionary for the Whole Church, created by the Rev. Dr. Wilda C. Gafney.
Acts 2:3-5, 12-14 Psalm 41:1-4, 12-13 John 20:19-31
Would you, like Thomas, want to touch Jesus’ wounds?
It’s clear that the other disciples do not. If anything, in their rush to celebrate the return of their friend, they ignore the very thing, his wounds, that Jesus wants to show them.
Look at the scene again. The disciples are disoriented. Their friend has been killed; executed, crucified, brutally. They had betrayed him, and then abandoned him. His shame, and theirs, casting doubt on all they had placed their hope in. They don’t know what to think, to believe, or to do. Over dinner, some days earlier, Jesus had even told them that they would not understand what was happening until later, but they didn’t understand that either. All they do know is fear. And so they have locked themselves in a room.
And then Jesus returns to them. He appears among them, despite the locked door. And he directly addresses their fear with his very first words: “Peace be with you all.” He then shows them his hands and side, his wounded body, and they rejoice.
There. Right there. Did you hear it? Did you feel it? The disciples move too quickly, don’t they? As if averting their eyes. Looking away from the brutalized body before them. He shows them his wounds, and they rejoice. So, Jesus starts again, as if patiently starting over, saying a second time, “Peace be with you all.” And he tells them to go out. He breathes his warm breath upon them, giving them his spirit, that they might have the courage to understand and go forth with good news.
We are then told that Thomas was not with them. If we think of this ghostly apparition, this resurrection appearance, as simply the set up for the story of a so-called doubting Thomas, we miss everything.
Thomas is maligned as doubting Thomas. As if he doubted the resurrection, or the word of the others. But he does have good reason to believe the other disciples missed something important, doesn’t he? After all, the others say they have met Jesus, that he has returned to them, gifted them and sent them out, but eight days later they are still locked in the room. Thomas was the first one to open the door and find them inside. His arrival provides not only a way into the room, but [eventually] a way out.
I don’t think Thomas questions Jesus’ return or doubts the resurrection. Rather, as if by instinct, he seems to get it. The Jesus who returns in the wounded Jesus, risen by God. Jesus wants to show his wounds, and Thomas wants to see them, to touch them. Not ignore them. “I want to see and to touch what Jesus’ wants to show us.” [1]
I think it would be fair to ask, did the other disciples really see him at all? If Jesus wanted to show them his wounds, and they moved quickly to celebration, what did they really see? if they move right to rejoicing, ‘we’ve got our friend back,’ did they really see him at all? Imagine, if Jesus returns and says, “peace be with you all” and then says to them “see me, look at me, look what was done to me,” and they don’t? What did they really see? Their actions say, “We don’t want to deal with that, let’s turn the page, move on to life after suffering, after death, beyond death.”
Without Thomas, without this story, we would not know that the resurrected body is the crucified and killed body, the body-of-suffering, the suffering body, raised up, rather than a glorified body, a glorious body. We would not know that suffering redeemed is not suffering erased, and forgotten, but suffering taken up in new life. Without the wounds, we might imagine resurrection as somehow making the past go away, of suffering explained. And we would miss something important.[2]
Jesus was crucified, which means brutalized. He was bloodied, bruised, beaten. He was scourged, his back flayed, his head crowned with thorns, his hands and feet torn, his abdomen pierced. This is what Jesus wanted his disciples to see. The point of Roman crucifixion was shame. Shaming. And the control that came with it. But the resurrected Jesus, the Jesus who experiences not life after death, but new life in the midst of death, wants his disciples to see that there is no shame. He has joined the ranks of those the world brutalizes and shames, and God has raised him up. My God! Once the disciples understand this, they will be unstoppable, fearless, courageous, bearers of truly good news for those whom the world still crucifies and brutalizes. But first they have to look.
While the western church has maligned Thomas as a doubter and made him a patron saint of skepticism and science (“prove it”), the eastern church knows Thomas as a healer and educator. In India, Thomas is the patron saint of medicine. Because, like a doctor, there is healing in his touch. This is a healing story.
As good doctors know, you cannot heal without touching wounds, acknowledging suffering, and that can hurt. I imagine Thomas touching, not the antiseptic holes in Jess’ hands and feet and side that we see depicted in so much Christian art, but Thomas tenderly touching welts, bruises, torn skin. The violence of it all. I imagine Jesus wincing, Even recoiling. His body hurts. These are scars that are never going to go away. Crucifixion was brutal, but Thomas went right to the brutality. Like a doctor.
It is hard to touch wounds. But Thomas is tender. There is compassion in his touch. And healing.[3]
What if this touch, like Mary’s embrace of Jesus in the garden, is a healing touch that Jesus needs? And since touch is always double – the one touching is also being touched – what if this is a healing touch that Thomas needs?[4]
It has been said that the failure of the church in the 21st century is a failure of imagination.[5] I am inviting you this morning to imagine this story as one of healing, rather than skepticism or “proof” of the resurrection. A story that demonstrates new life merging in the midst of death, of how new life emerges in the midst of death. Through tender touch. And tending wounds.[6]
I want to end in a slightly different register, with a different way of touching wounds – a virtual touching that is no less real, appropriate to an age of smartphones and texting, and no less difficult or risky. I share a poem by Michael Saline, written this past week, called “Thomas Texts”:
Today on Easter
I texted “Happy Easter” to a friend
from whom I am estranged
To my joyful surprise he replied:
“Happy Easter – Miss You!”
back to me
Don’t trust the strongly defended
who protest “Jesus did not rise
from the dead!”
Sometime angels roll back stones
on tombs of wounded love
Easier to let it lie
Now the next steps are ours
as we walk towards Emmaus
inviting him in with us
Today a voice invited me to
stick my text finger into a wound
which texted me back[7]
May we have the strength, and courage, the boldness and wisdom, to reach out and touch the wounds of others, exposing our own at the same time. We just may find the risen Christ in our midst. Amen.
* * * * * *
Following the sermon, we sang the lovely hymn “Christ Has Risen While Earth Slumbers.” We affirmed our faith using the Presbyterian Church (USA)’s A Brief Statement of Faith and prayed using the words of C. Eric Mount, published in Let Us Pray: Reformed Prayers for Christian Worship (Geneva, 2002). Pp. 41-42.
[1] I am indebted to theologian Shelly Rambo for her re-reading of the Thomas story. Start with her “How Christian Theology and Practice Are Being Shaped by Trauma Studies.” The Christian Century. November 1, 2019. Then read her powerful book, Resurrecting Wounds: Living in the Aftermath of Trauma. (2018)
[2] Richard Kearney, Touch: Recovering Our Most Vital Sense. (Columbia, 2021).
[3] “In this vision of resurrection, Jesus is inviting Thomas to participate in the ministerial vision. But Thomas will need, as well, to address his relationship to those wounds. It would be too easy to turn Thomas to the work of healing without considering the ways in which the cross event exposes the “hereditary evil” that lives within him. To continue the ministry of Jesus must involve a reckoning with past harms. There is a confrontation with the cross that we can imagine taking place. The defilement, the cruelty, of one’s actions does not disappear but, in fact, takes different form.” Shelly Rambo, Resurrecting Wounds.
[4] See my Touching Resurrection: An Easter Sermon. April 17, 2022.
[5] “The key pathology of our time, which seduces us all, is the reduction of the imagination so that we are too numbed, satiated and co-opted to do serious imaginative work.” Walter Brueggemann, Interpretation and Obedience. (Fortress Press, 1991). p. 199.
[6] “The stakes in probing how this story is told are wrapped up in thinking about whether resurrection, within Christian theology, can testify to the ambiguities of living in the aftermath of trauma, and ultimately whether it can testify to divine presence in ways other than a triumphalistic account of life overcoming death. Is it possible to think of an ongoingness rather than an overcoming?” Shelly Rambo, “Trauma, Resurrection, and the Anatheistic Wager,” in Richard Kearny’s Anatheistic Wager: Philosophy, Theology, Poetics, edited by Chris Doude van Troostwijk and Matthew Clemente. (Indiana University Press, 2018)
[7] Mark Saline, “Thomas Texts.” 2022. https://giftsinopenhands.wordpress.com/2022/04/18/thomas-texts-guest-post-from-mark-saline/
Touching Resurrection: An Easter Sermon
A sermon preached by the Rev. Jeffrey A. Geary for the White Plains Presbyterian Church on Easter Sunday / The Day of Resurrection 2022. We are currently following Lectionary Year W, A Women’s Lectionary for the Whole Church, created by the Rev. Dr. Wilda C. Gafney.
Psalm 18:2-11, 16-19 John 20:1-18
Mary Magdalene was the first to the tomb. It was still dark. And when she arrived, she found the stone of the tomb rolled away. The body of Jesus, her teacher, her friend; was not within. She runs to Peter and the other disciple saying, “they have taken my lord.” One can imagine her frantic anxiety. Together the three of them race back to the tomb. They explored the discarded linens within the empty tomb and then; then? Then they returned home.
Peter and the disciple whom Jesus loved returned home. One wonders, did Peter’s wife whom he had left behind to follow Jesus, welcome him home? Was she glad he was back? Was she mourning too? And the disciple whom Jesus loved, what home did he return to. Did it feel empty – as empty as the tomb? While these disciples retreat in their grief, Mary instead remains immobile. She stands at the tomb and weeps. Perhaps she’s frozen in disbelief. Perhaps, she had no home to go home to.
Whatever the reason, she remains, weeping. She feels an obligation to attend to the body of Jesus and that body is missing. Why it is missing, how it is missing, who knows. But she has come to attend to his body and it is not there. She cannot cover it with salve and ointment. She cannot wrap him in a shroud. She cannot make her peace.
“Woman, why are you weeping?” comes the voice. And she thinks it’s the gardener until he calls her by name, “Mary.” Rabbi, she replies, reaching toward him, and embracing him. She cannot cover his body with salve and ointment, but she can comfort him with tender touch. She cannot wrap him in a shroud, but she can wrap him in her arms. And they can share a tactile peace, together.[1]
I pause to emphasize this physical embrace because we do not see it explicitly in the text. Rather, it is implied in Jesus words, “do not [continue] holding me.” I pause because the entire western theological tradition is based on a fourth century translation of this phrase from Greek into Latin where “do not [continue] holding me” became “do not touch me.” As in “don’t you dare.” Visit any museum, google any image of Mary and Jesus in the garden, and you will see depicted the prohibition of touch. But don’t we need more images of intimacy in our devotion to God?[2]
Touch is the most powerful of our senses, and appropriate, tender touch is restorative, and healing. especially in times of grief. Tender touch alleviates anxiety, bolsters the immune system, lowers blood pressure, helps with sleep and digestion, and wards off colds and infections. It feeds us body and soul. It is absolutely vital to our physical and mental well-being, something we all experienced during the last two years as touch was indeed and necessarily limited or prohibited. I’ve learned from practitioners of Reiki to place my hand upon my own chest when I am anxious. Do you remember back in 2020 that it became nearly impossible to find pets to adopt? To fight off loneliness and meet our need for touch, which is not limited to human touch, people sought physical companionship in cats and dogs and other species as well.[3]
Unlike the other senses, touch is doubled. The one who does the touching is also being touched, the one using this sense is also being sensed. When Mary embraces Jesus, he embraces her. It is not a grasping, holding, or holding back; it is mutual, healing touch, more like hands being held at a hospital bedside, or the arm placed around the shoulder of someone in grief, a familiar hug between old friends, or like lovers spooning.
Held by her, and holding her, Jesus gently says, “Mary, don’t hold on to me, I’ve not yet ascended.”[4]
This is not the first time in Scripture that we’ve seen this kind of devotion.
In the opening chapters of the book of Ruth, Naomi, having lost her husband and both sons, decides to return from Moab to Judah. She is weighed down with grief. And Ruth and Orpah, her daughter in laws, follow her. But Naomi tells them to turn back and return to their people. While Orpah follows Naomi’s command, Ruth refuses and clings to her, holding her in an embrace. She implores Naomi, “Do not press me to leave you or to turn back from following you! Where you will go, I will go.”[5]
Jesus tells Mary, “I must go to my Father and your Father, my God and your God.”
But unlike Ruth, Mary cannot go where Jesus is going. Not yet. Instead, Jesus’s pivots to a commission. He doesn’t allow her to follow him; but sends her out as the first apostle to proclaim the good news of his resurrection. “Go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I have seen the savior.’” And with that, Mary becomes the first apostle, indeed the apostle to the apostles. But first, she must let go.
Transformation is at the heart of the resurrection gospel. In our next hymn we follow Mary’s journey, as in every verse she weeps in the garden – but the distance between the weeping in the first verse and the weeping in the last verse is the difference between death and new life; and it turns on the moment when the supposed gardener calls her name and, you now know, they share a loving embrace.[6]
[1] I’ve preached on the visual portrayal of Mary’s “mistake” before, as it was a subject in my unfinished doctoral dissertation. See “Garden Party, An Easter Sermon,” April 21, 2014.
[2] The Latin is Noli me tangere. See Barbara Baert, et al. Noli me tangere: Mary Magdalene: One Person, Many Images. (Peeters Publishers, 2006). See also Jean-Luc Nancy, Noli me tangere: On the Raising of the Body. (Perspectives in Continental Philosophy).(Fordham, 2008).
[3] See Richard Kearney, Touch: Recovering Our Most Vital Sense. (Columbia, 2020). I owe the observation about pets to several public talks Prof. Kearney gave during 2020.
[4] Richard Rohr explores this liminal moment in the presence of Mary in which the familiar Jesus must become the universal Christ in The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For, and Believe. (Convergent, 2019).
[5] Also relevant here as a Hebrew Scripture referent is Song of Solomon 3: In the Song we find a woman searching for her lover.
“I sought him whom my soul loves; I sought him, but found him not; I called him, but he gave no answer. “I will rise now and go about the city, in the streets and in the squares; I will seek him whom my soul loves.” I sought him, but found him not. The sentinels found me, as they went about in the city. “Have you seen him whom my soul loves?” Scarcely had I passed them, when I found him whom my soul loves. I held him, and would not let him go …
[6] Drawn from Carl P. Daw Jr., Glory to God: A Companion. (2016). For the hymn, “Woman, Weeping in the Garden” by Daniel Charles Damon.
Lent V: Rooted and Grounded in Love
Isaiah 51: 1-8 Psalm 148 Ephesians 3:14-20 Luke 13:8-21
I pray that, according to the riches of his glory, he may grant that you may be strengthened in your inner being with power through his Spirit, and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love. I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. Ephesians 3:14-20
What is it that sustains you? What is it that sustains you? Or maybe, we should ask, who is it that sustains you? Who gives you the strength to go on? Who gives you the solid hope to push that soft sheet off your stomach in the morning and forge through the darkness to greet another day of life? Is it your child? Is it your beloved? Is it your friend? Is it your dream? Is it your job? … Is it habit?
Does life seem more like a routine, a getup, put on the coffee, take a seven minute shower, iron the shirt, drink the coffee, brush the teeth, grab your stuff and rush to the car to get to the highway to get to work to sit at the desk to go through the papers and yak with your boss so you can swallow lunch in a half-hour in order to catch up on yesterday’s work and pick the children up from day camp to make a hot dog and drive to ball practice and yell a bit and stuff everyone back in the car so you can hit the mall before you get home to see the last half of Jimmy Fallon after bedding down the kids?
Or do you stay in your home most of the day, working, and cleaning, and designing? Or do you spend your hours remembering the way things used to be, how you used to make more decisions, but now having grown older and living in a different place, in a different world, you find a certain apathy protects you from the pain of not being able to do everything you want. Or perhaps you’ve been waiting for that part-time job to come through and it hasn’t. Your old place laid you off and the money’s running out. Dazed you sit by the front window and watch the world scurry by like a bunch of ants with busy-work. You used to be a part — and when you were in the thick of the hustle it seemed meaningful. Now it just seems temporary, uncertain craziness, and here you are, hoping against hope to be identified with that crowd again, to jump back into the rat race.
What is it that nourishes you? What keeps you going? The writer of Ephesians says, “I pray that according to the riches of God’s glory, God may grant that you may be strengthened in your inner being with power through God’s Spirit, and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love.” When was the last time you felt strengthened in your inner being? Was it during a crisis? Was it one evening as the sun set in its orange beauty? Was it at the birth of your baby? Was it when your love touched you gently? Was it when your mother told you she thought the way you handled a problem was wonderful? Was it during prayer last week in church? We may or may not feel it right now, but God is at work within all of us giving us strength for today and even tomorrow. Giving us power to live, to change, to grow, to yearn, to reach, to love, to be.
Christ seeks to make a home in our hearts. To dwell, to abide. To stay with us during the night. To rise with us in the morning. To nest in the complex fibers of our loves and worries and just be. Christ will dwell with us as we are being rooted and grounded in love.
What does it mean to be “rooted and grounded in love?” Imagine holding a fragile plant with roots dangling and dirt caught in between. Now imagine digging and securing this plant into rich black soil. Being rooted and grounded in love means to have a fertile place from which to grow and blossom. Perhaps this place is in this church, or in your family, or with a close friend, with a therapist, with a sponsor, with your partner. This is a safe place where we can expose our roots, our origins, our anchorings, our deepest parts, because this place, this dirt, cherishes them as essential. For it is these dangling roots that grasp into the soil and moor the plant, encouraging us to nudge forward, green, stretch, blossom, burst, yawn toward the light. This is one way of being rooted and grounded.
And yet, when we say rooted and grounded in love, we realize that sometimes we must pull out our roots from where they are and transplant. Sometimes this is a painful ripping out from friends and family, from work, from school, so our future relationships will not be mired in strangling tangles or so that the roots can grasp for more dirt. We may be transplanted so that our roots can sink deeper and allow us to be more flexible, to bend more with the winds of the Spirit. Transplanting can be part of the process of being rooted and grounded in love.
And still another sense of being rooted and grounded in love, may be our radical willingness to be uprooted. For to be rooted in love means to be rooted in an unfathomable journey of faith, where part of the strength for the journey comes from “letting go.” To be rooted in love may mean for us to uproot from family and from our possessions and follow Jesus. And not to just follow Jesus generally, but to follow him specifically from Nazareth through Galilee, by the seas, in the midst of crowds, to the lepers on the outskirts of town, to the hill overlooking Jerusalem, to the table in that cramped upper room and to the cross of betrayal, and finally to a life of resurrection. What kind of rootedness is such uprootedness? Surely only an uprooted rootedness that could come from God. Surely only an ungrounded groundedness in our mysterious creator could thrive on such sustenance. This is a sustenance that experiences the vibrancy of life as the dance of God, not merely the recitation of a creed.
An Indian philosopher named Samkara once said, “To know is to be.” To know is to be. In order to know or to understand the fullness of God, we must be it. We must live with God. We must allow God to be with us, in us, through us, before us, behind us, beside us. And this does not happen all at once. As we walk with God, we become more conscious of how our Creator is moving in and through us.
Solomon asked God to give him an understanding mind, that he would be able to discern between good and evil. Another, more literal translation of the Hebrew is for God to give him a listening heart. A listening heart to govern God’s people. Solomon seeks wisdom. And wisdom is granted as a by-product of walking in God’s ways, as an outgrowth of keeping God’s commands. Wisdom is not some unchangeable and eternal thing, some hunk of truth that falls out of the heavens, some book that intellectuals put together on how the world works, some code to the universe, or key to some hitherto “hidden prophesy.” Rather, wisdom is a natural by-product of walking with God. Wisdom is not the premise; it is the result of the walk. One does not start out with wisdom and then follow God. Wisdom comes as we follow God. A wise and discerning mind is a mind that is open to God as we journey through life, whether we are king or school teacher, plumber, minister, or artist.
In a book that is aptly titled Listening Hearts, several spiritual directors, pastors, and theologians describe what discernment is.
“The ability to discern develops in a relationship with God, as one becomes rooted and grounded in the heart of God…As we move toward spiritual maturity, we move beyond the need for specific rules and answers into the darkness of God where we must act in faith rather than certainty.
Because the evidence and experiences on which we act are usually conflicting and ambivalent, and because we are by nature vulnerable to our capacity for self-deception, discernment is often tentative and uncertain. We may not feel a great sense of having found the truth. Discernment can be like driving an automobile at night: the headlights cast only enough light for us to see the next small bit of road immediately in front of us. Discernment does not imply fully comprehending God’s will, but rather it raises the question, What is the next step God wants me to take? Ultimately, discernment requires our willingness to act in faith on our sense of what God wants us to do next. We need to risk making mistakes. We can dare to make mistakes because we know that God has forgiven us when we are wrong. What is important is that we act on what we have discerned. In obedience to discernment, more discernment will come.[1]
And so we ask this morning, “What is the next step God wants me to take?” And as a congregation, “What is the next step God wants us to take?”
God honors our wisdom seeking by rooting and grounding us in God’s own vibrant heart as we come to the table together. Amen.
[1] Excerpted from Listening Hearts, Farnham et al., Morehouse Publishing, Inc., c.1991, pp.25-27.
Lent IV: The Practice of Listening
A sermon preached by The Rev. Lynn Dunn for the White Plains Presbyterian Church on the Fourth Sunday of Lent, March 27, 2022. We are currently following Lectionary Year W, A Women’s Lectionary for the Whole Church, created by the Rev. Dr. Wilda C. Gafney.
On this Sunday I was quarantined at home, and am grateful Rev. Dunn could both preach as well as ordain and install new elders. The entire service, including Pastor Lynn’s sermon on listening as a spiritual practice, can be viewed using this link from her Youtube page. The sermon begins at 19:13.
Lent III: Inherent Dignity
A sermon preached by The Rev. Jeffrey A. Geary for the White Plains Presbyterian Church on the Third Sunday of Lent, March 20, 2022. We are currently following Lectionary Year W, A Women’s Lectionary for the Whole Church, created by the Rev. Dr. Wilda C. Gafney.
Genesis 3:8-21 Psalm 96 Romans 8:31-39. Mark 13:14-22
Today I want to lightly braid together three items: first, the four readings from the women’s lectionary (that together create a picture of the world in which we live, struggle, and seek salvation), then some passages from a book I have been reading for my own personal Lenten devotions, and finally a reflection on this week in the war in Ukraine.
First, the lectionary provides a picture of the world in which we live. The translator describes the interrelations of these readings as follows: They all acknowledge that “The world is a hostile place. The garden stories in Genesis give voice to an ancestral memory that it was not always thus. These stories also articulate the Iron Age theology the permeates much of the scriptures, that the difficulties humanity faces must be their own fault. Yet the world is also a glorious creation celebrated by the psalmist. [T]he gospel makes clear, [however,] that there are very real dangers in the present world that are the consequence of human evil, greed and grasping imperial ambitions. [Women and children are particularly, unmistakably, and disproportionately victims in times of war – a word for our times that was almost unbearable to read this morning,] while the epistle [to the romans] assures [us] that in all these things God is with us and for us.”[1]
Those of you who took up my invitation last Sunday to privately meditate upon these scriptures throughout the week no doubt bring a richness of insight, comfort, challenge and question to their public reading in worship.
One of the books that has been accompanying me on my Lenten journey this year is the debut memoir by Cole Arthur Riley titled This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us (Convergent, 2022). The young author appeared a few years ago in the early days of the pandemic as the curator of an Instagram account called Black Liturgies. Black Liturgies is described as “a project seeking to integrate the truths of dignity, lament, rage, justice, and rest into written prayers.” It’s a site for contemplation, blending literature and spirituality, and I recommend it to you. A quick google search for “black liturgies” and an oral reading of what you find there can be one new resource for you as you take up the Invitation to Observe a Holy Lent, particularly the practice of prayer.
As a writer, Cole Arthur Riley is visibly influenced by Audrey Lorde, Octavia Butler, James Baldwin, Thomas Merton, Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Julian of Norwich. That alone should be enough to commend her to you. In her memoir, however, which became an instant New York Times bestseller when it was published last month, she blends these powerful voices with stories from her own family across at least four generations. It was sheer coincidence that as I started studying the Lenten scriptures a few weeks ago, especially the Genesis passages, it was sheer coincidence that Riley opens her book with a chapter on dignity, and a reflection on the Genesis story. Although you know what they say – coincidence is just God’s way of remaining anonymous.
I do not know if God meant to confirm value on us by creating us in their own image, but they had to have known it would at least be one outcome. How can anyone who is made to bear likeness to the maker of the cosmos be anything less than glory? This is inherent dignity. (p. 7)
Almost immediately, though, she challenges what I referred to earlier as an Iron Age theology, that human dignity sets us apart from the rest of creation, and that all trouble in the world is the result of human sin. Our Genesis passage has certainly been read that way, viewing the essentials of human survival, reproduction and food production, as curses. But I note that while a long line of Christian interpretation describes these [etiological descriptions] as curses, the Bible does not. The ground is cursed, yes, and the serpent is cursed. But not human beings. Never, human beings.[2] Cole writes,
I do find it peculiar that humans have come to wield this [inherent dignity] over the rest of creation as though we are somehow superior. I don’t believe this to be the case. Sometimes I wonder if we knelt down and put our ear to the ground, it would whisper up to us, yes, you were made in the image of God, but God made you of me. [With a nod to the Ash Wednesday liturgy, she writes,] We’ve grown numb to the idea that we ourselves are made of the dust, mysteriously connected to the goodness of the creation that surrounds us.
Perhaps the more superior we believe ourselves to be to creation, the less like God we become. But if we embrace shalom – the idea that everything is suspended in a delicate balance between the atoms that make me and the tree and the bird and the sky – if we embrace the beauty of all creation, we find our own beauty magnified. And what is shalom but dignity stretched out like a blanket over the cosmos. (p. 7-8).
To which I can only say, amen. That is what I called a couple of weeks ago being ‘beloved dust.’
This opening chapter of her book goes on to describe ways that we have distorted the meaning of inherent dignity and goodness, perverted our self-understanding into a source of shame, but also ways that a young black girl like herself can be made in our society to feel shame for her own body. She does this by telling stories about her grandmother as a young girl (whose own mother told her she saw the devil in her forehead), and what this grandmother passed on, or did not, to her own children, including Cole’s father. In a world that so casually strips human beings of inherent dignity, tries to deny it, take it from us and rob us of it, some more than others, Cole describes her long journey toward understanding that you also don’t give dignity to people, you can only affirm it. Along the way she describes encounters with black bodies, hungry bodies, homeless bodies, suffering bodies, queer bodies, and alludes to but does not yet describe her own experience of disability. (She also consistently writes with a multitude of pronouns for God and others). Her reflection on inherent dignity concludes with a story from her own adolescence, a reflection on our Genesis reading today that should send us all back to the scripture, and a min-sermon. I share it this morning at length.
Because of what we’ve made of dignity, it can be difficult, if not impossible, to believe in it.
When I was eight years old, before I could make sense of why I fled the other children on the playground and lied about having friends, my hair began to turn gray. Course white strands shriveled up on the crown of my head without invitation, politely wrapping themselves around their black peers and strangling them in the night. It was an invasion. And the attention was agonizing. Every day I’d sit squirming and rocking in my desk, head bowed like a monk praying for my own invisibility. The gaze of Alex Demarco at my back. He only pointed out a hair once, but the moment stuck to me. I asked my teacher if I could switch to the empty desk in the back row, knowing there I could exhale. She said no.
By the time I turned eleven, I would spend ages in front of the mirror parting my hair just right so that as little white as possible was visible. One night, we were all going out and my family was waiting downstairs for me to finish parting. Eventually, my dad sent everyone to wait in the car and came to the bottom of the stairs and called for me.
When he asked how much longer I’d be, all of the shame that had crusted over my muscles from years of parting combusted. I threw a fit. I don’t remember the details surrounding it, apart from a comb thrown against my brother’s door. I mainly recall the episode by the memory of my father’s face, which had a calm blankness that only made my own body, flailing and loud, more of a spectacle. When my crying softened, I finally said, feeling more embarrassed than before, I can’t do this anymore. And then, with certainty, I have to dye my hair.
My father’s response, his face, still lives in me. He calmly asked me to come down from the stairs, and the low sound waves from his voice slid under my feet and flew me from that top stair to where he stood. He tucked my head into his chest, sowed a kiss into my hair, and just said, OK, honey. We can dye your hair. I was so addled that my tears dried up, and I didn’t say another word. He summoned my hair into a bun, and we walked to the car together.
I remember many conversations about the doom and consequence imparted by God after humans ate from that tree. I learned of the curses, too, and could maybe even recite them. But no one ever told me of the tenderness of this moment. It makes me question the tone of everything that surrounds it.
In the garden, when shame had replaced Eve’s and Adam’s dignity, God became a seamstress. He took the skin off of his creation to make something that would allow humans to stand in the presence of their maker and one another again. Isn’t it strange that God didn’t just tell Adam and Eve to come out of hiding and stop being silly, because he’s the one who made them and has seen every part of them? He doesn’t say that in this story, or at least we do not know if he did. But we do know that God went to great lengths to help them stand unashamed.
Sometimes you can’t talk someone into believing their dignity. You do what you can to make a person feel unashamed of themselves, and you hope in time they will believe in their beauty all on their own. That day on the stairs, my father could have very well tried to convince me that I was beautiful, begged me to believe that my gray hair was okay. But I think he knew that in order to stand in the presence of myself and others, he needed to allow for the unnecessary. The strange thing is, we never did buy the hair dye. In fact, I never asked about it again. By the time I was in high school, the white began to go away all on its own.
…
People say we are unworthy of salvation. I disagree. Perhaps we are very much worth saving. It seems to me that God is making miracles to free us from the shame that haunts us. Maybe the same hand that made garments for a trembling Adam and Eve is doing everything he can that we might come a little closer. I pray the stitches hold.
Our liberation begins with the irrevocable belief that we are worthy to be liberated, that we are worthy of a life that does not degrade us but honors our whole selves. When you believe in your dignity, or at least someone else does, it becomes more difficult to remain content with the bondage with which you have become so acquainted. You begin to wonder what you were meant for. (p. 12-15).
If God is for us, who can be against us?
The final strand I want to weave into my reflection this morning is this past week in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. I know you are glued to the news each day, horrified by, or avoiding, the images and videos, as you need to for your own self-care, and praying, praying, praying. We will be taking the One Great Hour of Sharing special offering today which is how the Presbyterian Church (USA) responds to crises like these to support self-development, feeding the hungry, and rebuild after disaster. I challenged the idea earlier that all suffering in the world is the result of human sin, but some of it surely is! As civilian deaths began to rise dramatically in this fourth week of the war, I’m still haunted by the image of the mother and her unborn child who were killed when the maternity ward was bombed in Mariupol. And I hear the words of Jesus in our Gospel, “Woe to those who have a child in womb and to those who are nursing infants in those days!” Days of greed, conquest and war.
On Friday, Westchester clergy of all faiths gathered for a prayer service in White Plains, under the banner, “Stand with Ukraine.” (Here I held up one of the posters). The Presbyterian Church was represented by The Rev. Susan de George, our General Presbyter Deb Milcarek, and myself. I want to close by offering the prayer shared by Deb Milcarek on that occasion … let us pray …
God of mercy, justice and peace:
Our spirits are heavy with sorrow, our souls shocked
At the sudden and breathtaking violence,
the invasion of Ukraine by their neighbor, Russia.
We pray for lives caught in the grip of war,
who hear the bombs in the night,
the ominous movement of troops on the road into town
the whistle of incoming shells,
for a cry from a desperate neighbor or a shout of warning.
For those who huddle in subways and basements
or flee for the borders, clutching their children’s hands
We pray for families separated from fathers, brothers and sons
who must remain to fight and protect their homeland.
We pray for neighbors in Eastern and Central Europe
As their hearts and doors open to these refugees
That strained resources will become an abundance of hope
That fears and struggles with racism will yield to a generosity of profound welcome
That communities of faith within Ukraine will be protected from harm
and sustained in their efforts to feed and shelter their neighbors.
That peacemakers and protesters in Russia will be heard and their lives preserved.
May we undergird our prayers with tangible resources to help.
May we reach deeply, give generously, and welcome extravagantly.
May we lift our voices in a strong and unified advocacy.
May we all, even as we breathe in lament, breathe out mercy, hope and peace.
And in this Lenten season, when we walk the way toward death and resurrection, repent our complicity in cultures of violence and renew our efforts toward justice and peace.
–Prayer by the Rev. Dr. Laurie Kraus, Director, Presbyterian Disaster Assistance
[1] https://www.wilgafney.com/womenslectionary/
[2] Wilda C. Gafney, A Women’s Lectionary for the Whole Church: A Multi-Gospel Single Year Lectionary (Church Publishing Inc, 2021), p. 84. See also her Womanist Midrash: A Reintroduction to the Women of the Torah and Throne. (WJK, 2017).
Lent II: Engaging God’s Word(s)
A sermon preached by The Rev. Jeffrey A. Geary for the White Plains Presbyterian Church on the Second Sunday of Lent, March 13, 2022. We are currently following Lectionary Year W, A Women’s Lectionary for the Whole Church, created by the Rev. Dr. Wilda C. Gafney.
This is a placeholder for the sermon, which is coming soon.
In the meantime, the sermon and worship service can be viewed here: https://youtu.be/WmG3QvSYceU
Lent I: We Are Beloved Dust
A sermon preached by The Rev. Jeffrey A. Geary for the White Plains Presbyterian Church on the First Sunday of Lent, March 6, 2022. We are currently following Lectionary Year W, A Women’s Lectionary for the Whole Church, created by the Rev. Dr. Wilda C. Gafney.
Prayer for Illumination: Gracious and loving God, we come before you with open hearts, willing to look at the truth about ourselves, hoping to find healing and new life. We are preparing to make our Lenten journey to travel with Jesus along the path which led to the cross. Through the reading of your word and sharing of your table, may we respond with courage and strength and confidence in your constant love. Amen.
*Genesis 2: 7 – 9, 15-25 Psalm 104: 1-4, 10-15, 27-30 Colossians 3: 1-11 Mark 16: 9 – 15
*Extensive commentary on the Genesis passage was given before the scripture was read
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This past week, The Rev. Dr. Wil Gafney, creator of the Women’s Lectionary for the Whole Church and translator of our scripture readings today, received the following question from a pastor preparing to preach today: “Umm, did you mean to /why did you use the Easter reading for [the first Sunday of] Lent?” In fact, Dr. Gafney said in her reply, she has been asked some version of this question many times. I quote her response in full:
This week’s [four] readings invite us to reflect on the whole of our human story from the dust of our creation to the hope of our redemption, to carry that story with us as we journey through Lent. We are sojourning through the Lenten wilderness because we have heard and believed the good news. And perhaps, because we are horror struck at the cost of that gospel. We are preparing for the next forty days to hear and receive that good news with clean hands and hearts. The epistle provides one set of thunderous instructions on how to do so. The psalm offers a portrait of the majesty of God before which we must repent and concludes with the grace of the spirit to renew us and, the whole earth.
Amen.
We carry the whole of our human story from the dust of our creation to the hope of our redemption. This is the journey of Lent. Lent is a time to look deeply inside ourselves to see the ways we hurt one another and our world by not living as God intends; a time when we commit ourselves to changes and to new beginnings. But without the hope held out by the resurrection of Jesus, we could not face the close examination of Lent, or have the strength to make new beginnings. It is in the assurance of Easter that we are able to make our Lenten journey.
Our Ash Wednesday service is, at least for me, the high point of the liturgical calendar. It is ground and grounding for everything else. In that service, and on the first Sunday in lent, “we return to our most ancestral stories, to remind ourselves we are all earthlings, creatures of the earth, of the soil we till, the soil to which we shall return.” As Wil Gafney puts it, “There is both dignity and humility in our creation at the hands of God, breathed into living by the spirit of God.”[1] I usually tell the story this way: there are, in fact, two creation stories in Genesis, and each has a different view of what it means to be a human person. One was told when the people were proud and mighty in the days of King David. That story spoke to a haughty people of the need for humility, “Remember, you were made out of the dust of the ground and to dust you will return.” The other story was told to God’s people when they were broken and despairing and living in exile. It reminded a humiliated people, “Remember, you were made in the image of God, beloved of God.” We need, I believe, to tell and hear both stories, for we must always know that we are sinners and saints, (not, I said a few days ago, some of us are sinners and others are saints, but we are each sinner and saint, sinning saints, or saintly sinners) people asking for forgiveness and people being told that we are loved.
This year about thirty of us gathered on Wednesday to be reminded of both of our mortality and that we are loved. As each person comes forward to receive the sacrament, I greet them by name. I gently place my ash covered thumb on the frail flesh of each forehead, resting my fore-fingers on the hair of the head, or if there is no hair, on the skin. For Presbyterians, this is shockingly intimate. Apart from passing the peace, this is our only physical contact, our only liturgical touch, all year long. It was this year the first intentional touch in two years. I struggled to hold back tears.
I make the sign of the cross – swiping down swiping right. Addressing each person by name, I say something like, “Danielle/Mike/Aris/Beryl, remember that you are mortal, dust of the earth, and to dust you will return.” Perhaps it is the intimacy of touch, or the proximity with which we look into one another’s eyes (a proximity usually reserved for friends, or lovers), or the vulnerability that comes with the truth we speak, but there is often mutual recognition: I see grief – all the dead we have loved and mourn, and continue to mourn, are present. An honesty about aging, and limits of our bodies, recent injuries or heath scares, current illness, all rise to the surface. And I am conscious, of ways I have failed in each relationship.
And then, as the body of Christ is received in the elements of bread and juice, I (or pastor Sarah, or Pastor Lynn) say, “Richard/Kelly/Jane/Ty, remember that you are made in the image of God, you are beautiful, and God loves you.” The challenge is to hold both of these truths together.
We carry the whole of our human story from the dust of our creation to the hope of our redemption. As we journey through Lent. And as we journey through life.
Following our service on Wednesday, strengthened by the scripture and song we had shared, and sustained by the sacrament we had received, I visited a friend who is in the process of dying. As we prayed, I repeated the Ash Wednesday liturgy as the deepest truth I could speak about her, what our presbyterian creed calls ‘our only comfort in life and death.’[2] Placing water instead of ash on her fore-head, as a sign of her baptism, of her belonging to God and her participation in the death and life of Christ, I said, “Dear friend, you are mortal, dust of the earth, and to dust you will return. But you are also made in the image of God, and beloved. God loves you. And will receive you.”
Can we believe this? Trust this? For ourselves?
To carry the whole of our human story from the dust of our creation to the hope of our redemption, not only through Lent, but through life, is to learn to live out of this fundamental truth. It is, if you will pardon the pun, the ground (or grounding) of faith. To be human, humus, which is of course to be kin with all creation, is to be ‘beloved dust.’
My personal devotions during Lent this year are shaped by an extended passage from Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Ethics,on spiritual formation. Bonhoeffer was writing these unfinished (and posthumously published) reflections when he was arrested, imprisoned and eventually executed by the Nazi State.[3] In the passage I will share with you this morning, Bonhoeffer looks to the incarnation, the word and wisdom of God made flesh, to understand the depths of God’s love for us, God’s loving embrace of us, and our world. In the background, of course, are ideologies that deny our common humanity – physical disciplines that separate the strong from the weak, racial superiority and white supremacy – but also – but also – our real difficulty is trusting and believing that God loves us. Thus, his turn to Jesus, not as a model of ideal humanity, but as God’s embrace of real humanity. Bonhoeffer writes,
Behold God become human, the unfathomable mystery of the love of God for the world. God loves human beings. God loves the world. Not an ideal human, but human beings as they are; not an ideal world, but the real world. What we find repulsive in the opposition to God, what we shrink back from with pain and hostility, namely, real human beings, the real world, this is for God the ground of unfathomable love. God establishes a most intimate unity with THIS. God becomes human; a real human being: while we exert ourselves to grow beyond our humanity, to leave the human being behind us; God becomes human; and we must recognize that God wills that we be human, real human beings. While we distinguish between pious and godless; good and evil; noble and base; God loves real people without distinction. God has no patience with our dividing the world and humanity according to our standards and imposing ourselves as judges over them. God leads us into absurdity by becoming a real human being and a companion of sinners, thereby forcing us to become the judges of God. God stands beside the real human being and the real world against all the accusers. So God becomes accused along with human beings and the world, and thus the judges become the accused.[4]
The last sentences can be unpacked as you reflect on the print version of this sermon, and I’ll put the whole citation in the mid-week email: God’s becoming human, a real human being, judges our own intolerance for real human beings. God become human in Jesus Christ judges our poor or casual treatment of one another, our impatience and unkindness and disappointment toward real people. This, this (here I patted and embraced my own body of flesh), is what God loves, this imperfect, impermanent, Godly mess, this beloved dust. For God so loves the world, all creation, even us, that God became part of it, part of us, one of us. Can we accept this as truth? As the truth about or neighbor? The person sitting beside us? The person irritating us for whatever reason? Even the person betraying us? Can we accept this as the truth about ourselves?
You can fill in the blank with all the things you consider unlovable about yourself – you know you have them – how deeply you feel them. I have them. Can you fathom how deeply God loves this you? This real you? This is the first step of our Lenten journey this year. It is the real you that is invited to the Lord’s table today.
© The Rev. Jeffrey A. Geary
White Plains Presbyterian Church
[1] Wil Gafney: https://www.wilgafney.com/womenslectionary/
[2] Heidelberg Catechism Q1: What is you only comfort in life and in death? That I belong, both body and soul and in life and in death, not to myself, but to my faithful savior Jesus Christ.
[3] Charles Marsh, Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. (Knopf, 2014) pp. 213-217.
[4]Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Volume 6, Ethics. (Fortress, 2005) p. 84.
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