Dear Spencer,

Congratulations on your baptism, which we celebrated just a few minutes ago.  

It represents the beginning of your life as a Christian, and it’s a special day for the adults who love you best. 

Your birthday is special in its own way, of course. 

It’s a day to celebrate the simple wonder of your arrival.  

By contrast, your baptism is a day to name and honor what we hope your life will mean.  

Don’t worry when we say that – most of what your life will mean will be yours to discover and develop.  

With so many gifted musicians in your life, you don’t need to worry about people keeping track of one another, and reminding anyone who might need reminding that you have to find your own voice in this world…to make your own song.  

Baptism doesn’t just mean that we hope you will come to find God in your life.  

It represents our hope that you’ll find yourself in God’s life—that who you understand yourself to be will be grounded in the ongoing presence of God in the world.  

Our hope is that you’ll see your own story as part of that even greater story enfolding all of us and all Creation, and that you’ll find the meaning of who you are and what you do within that greater story.  

If you learn to hold yourself accountable to the ways you add to it, and also accountable the ways you might be taking away from it, you are sure to be a force for good, not only in the lives of those who are nearest and dearest to you, but well beyond. 

As for us, having you reminds us to make sure we do that, too. 

Now that you’re here, we have a much greater stake in the future—in where this story goes from here. 

Your impact has already begun.  

Now, if you were listening carefully, you might have heard a story that didn’t sound all that cheery for a joyous occasion.  

The outcome is happy: two healings take place. 

But they come on the far side of tremendous worry. 

Let’s set this up for a moment. 

First, there’s the healing of the woman in the middle of the crowd pressing in all around Jesus who reaches out to touch his cloak. 

Then there’s the healing of the little girl whose father, Jairus, is the president of their local synagogue. 

You’ve heard how the gospel writer Mark artfully weaves them together.  

We start with Jairus asking for help, and Jesus starts to follow, but then everything stops as Jesus encounters the woman, and then after that, he goes to Jairus’ house and heals his daughter.  

Mark doesn’t usually get a lot of points for being an artful writer—for example, he writes in Greek, but I’ve been told that he doesn’t do it all that well—so it’s nice to lift up a story of his that shows a little more literary technique than usual.  

He also tucks in a strange coincidence, of sorts…a random detail…that I’m guessing most people probably zoom right past. 

In fact, I’ll tell you what: let’s make it a quiz. 

Raise your hand if you caught the detail of how long Mark says that the woman in the crowd has been sick.  

How long? 

O.k…so there’s a part two to this test.  Double Jeopardy, where the scores can really change.    

Let’s jump to the part of the story where Jesus heals Jairus’ daughter, telling her, “talitha cum,” which is Aramaic for “Little girl, get up.” 

How old does Mark say she is?

It’s a wonderful detail that Mark does not particularly embellish or explain. 

He just sort of parks it there.  

But I think it’s another way that he’s weaving these two stories together.  

Think about what the last twelve years have been like for Jairus and his wife.  

The birth of a child. Her first steps.  

I remember when Grace first switched from milk in mommy’s lap to eating glop in her high chair, and we called everyone we knew to share the exciting news that she’d tried strained peas and liked them.  

Jairus was a prominent man, and the family would have been a public sort of family, but like any family, so much of their life would have been anchored by those milestones of a child getting older, learning to do things on her own, moving from playing to helping as she swiftly approached young womanhood. 

That’s what these twelve years have mostly been. 

But then one day, the bottom falls out.  

Overnight, his daughter gets sick.  Right away, it’s bad.   

Everything changes.  

Of course, for the woman who’s been bleeding, the last twelve years have been very different.  

It’s been a slower, yet unrelenting process of trying to get better, without success.  

Many doctors will admit that medicine can be an art as much as it is a science – that bodies decide for themselves which medicines and treatments will work, and how much of anything is too much or too little. 

We know this, too.  

Even with access to the best medicine in the history of the world, most of here know how challenging it can be to get it and keep it just right.  

For this woman, the milestones of her last twelve years are a medicine cabinet full of those little orange bottles, and a dining room table covered in bills, and a bevy of doctors shaking their heads and saying sorry but there’s nothing more they can do.  

By this point, the people in her life seem to have left her to fend or fall all by herself.

So for Jairus, it’s been twelve good years suddenly swept away by a crisis that’s almost certainly far worse than any possible sickness of his own, or even the thought of losing his own life. 

For the woman, it’s been twelve years of collapsing in slow motion, watching the life she knew gradually peel away.   

However they’ve gotten here, whatever the road has been, here they both are, looking at Jesus as their one last hope.  

And I think part of what Mark wants us to see is simply how vulnerability is a great equalizer.  

Whoever they thought themselves to be in the world, whatever role they decided they were going to play (or found themselves playing) in front of whatever audience, that’s all gone.  

They’ve come to a moment when it’s just them and God.    

Whatever their stories were before, those stories have come to an end.  

But God’s story hasn’t come to an end.  

And as these two people come before Jesus, they soon come to understand that they are being invited into God’s story. 

It’s striking to me that their desperation is so public, and yet their healing is so private.  

I think that’s because the people around them don’t have the compassion to acknowledge that desperation. 

Because they don’t, they don’t receive the gift of seeing God’s healing at work.  

God’s story offers us a better way to live. 

In the moments when our luck runs out and the well runs dry, we see so clearly what has always been right before us: the love and presence of God, with arms wide open, eager to fold us in. 

Spencer, in baptizing you today, we lift you into that same love and presence.  

We hope to teach you to live with open arms and open eyes.  

And may we all learn to live with compassion, to see with gratitude, and to sing our song with gusto. 

Amen.  

I had a boss once who didn’t like me much, at all.  

I would tell you why but still don’t know—it’s not as if something happened. 

When I was first hired, she had been all for it: I was the first assistant she’d ever had.  

But somehow, things cooled soon afterward. 

A month or so into it, I began to notice things: a murmured comment to someone else with a look in my direction, then a smile; lunch in the conference room with the door closed, as if it was a meeting and not just people having lunch; once, she used the specific words of an innocuous complaint I’d made to a colleague, working them into a totally different conversation about something else, just to show me that she’d heard about it.  That she knew.  

That was just the fall.  

So by February, I should have known.  

But one February Friday, there was a sleet storm in the middle of the day. 

All the same, I went out to get lunch, running across the street to the nearest lunch place through the cold glop falling from the sky. 

But as I was standing on line to order, it occurred to me that I should go ahead and get her something, too, because who wants to go out in a sleet storm, and I was already there, so why not? 

I knew what she always got at that place, anyway.

I ran back through the glop with my little brown bags and went up to her office.  

I knocked on the door, looking a little like I’d run under a sprinkler.  

You know when those brown bags get sort of shiny, just before they disintegrate? I remember the bags looked like that. 

Anyway, in I went.  

I smiled, “Who’s your favorite assistant of all time?” I asked with a big smile.  I might have even brandished the brown bag with her lunch in it ever-so-slightly, just so the stakes were clear.  

I hadn’t meant for this to be hard question. 

She looked at me silently and thoughtfully for a long moment, as if I’d asked a very good question, which, to review, I had not.  

While we are reviewing, let us also remember that I was the first assistant she’d ever had.  

Finally, she nodded her head and said, “Pam. She was an intern before you got here. Yeah. Definitely, Pam.” 

She looked at me silently for another moment. 

Finally, she asked, “Was there something else you wanted?”   

Now, it would make a much better story if right at that exact moment, the soggy paper bag with her lunch in it had broken and the diet coke summarily exploded and got all over everything.  

It did not.  

Inside, though, I broke a little bit. 

What I felt was the full force of my own embarrassment—the sudden revelation of just how much I actually cared and had all along…how much I wanted to be liked, to be included, to elicit her appreciation with thoughtful gesture, to prove my value and good humor – all those things. 

I don’t remember anything else, although I did give her the lunch.  

Mostly, I remember just wanting to get out of her office as quickly as possible. 

However it all got to that point—whatever that was really about—it was awful to feel so clear about what that particular relationship had become.  

II.

In Mark’s Gospel this morning, Jesus calls a man with a withered hand to come forward in front of his neighbors and friends – maybe even his own family.  

The story appears in three different gospels, and all of them mention how Jesus questions the congregation about doing good on the Sabbath, which is an important thing to ask, but Mark is the only one who specifically mentions the congregation’s powerful, even stubborn silence.  

That strikes me as a very important detail.  

Because when Jesus asks if it’s lawful to do good on the Sabbath – to save a life on the Sabbath – that may sound like an abstract question.  

It is unless you’re the one whose life needs saving.  

But even more to the point, Jesus isn’t asking just anybody. 

When he asks about doing good, he’s not conducting some random survey. 

Remember how the phone always used to ring right during dinner with someone from somewhere wanting to know how you felt about breakfast cereal, or what have you?

That’s not what this is.    

Jesus is asking the people who are closest to the man with the withered hand how they feel about doing good to him…how they feel about saving him without delay.  

This guy they know.  

Their response, sad to say, is to look back at Jesus silently and thoughtfully for a long moment, as if he had suddenly asked them a very good question.  

Except that it’s not a good question – at least, if you’re the man with the hand, it isn’t.   

Apparently, it’s also not a good question if you’re Jesus. 

The poet Maya Angelou once said, “When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.” 

Maybe even more than believing their words, we need to believe the horrible clarity of their silences. 

III.

And yet, don’t you feel like, for all the people in the first couple of rows, sitting there with “their stubborn hearts,” determined to say nothing, to get this whole thing over with, there have to be some others who are also there.

There have to be people in the crowd who are trying to find it in them…or who are already even fighting the urge to speak.  

When Jesus calls for a show of hands, you know someone wants to put theirs up at least half-mast.  

“Group think” is a thing.  We know that.   We’re in the middle of a group think renaissance right now.  

But empathy is a thing, too.  So is experience.  So are perspective and honesty and humility and curiosity.  And so is courage. 

They are never very far away. They lurk in any crowd. 

Because life is too stern a teacher to leave at least some of us unmoved by what people go through.  

It’s come far too close and we know it far too well. 

Some of us know things that we would not wish on our worst enemy, much less somebody else’s child.  

Things that have changed us.  Broken us open.  Taught us to see.  

We so badly need those people to speak right now. 

When someone makes it a point to interrupt silence, there is often something tremendously holy at work for everyone in the room. 

To speak, especially into the silence, is a way of stretching out to meet someone—often enough, someone standing right there. 

If you think about it, Scripture hastens to remind us of something that silence tries to make us forget: that there’s always someone standing right there…someone who needs to be seen, loved, and perhaps healed.  

We need to speak that seeing, loving, and healing back into the world in all the ways we can.   

IV.

So: Mark doesn’t tell us what happened to the man after his hand is restored.  

Did he run home, throw a few things in a knapsack, and run after Jesus? 

It’s possible. 

Personally, I think it would be sort of wonderful if he actually decided to stay, right? 

 You know: Jesus heals a hand and creates a monster, at least for that gathering. Or, really, more like an angel.   

Because if he stayed: think of him at the next Annual Meeting.  

Think of him on the subject of Coffee Hour.  

Think of him at Joys and Concerns.  

Think of him whenever bad things happened to good people in that community, or whenever bad things happened even to bad people in that community.  

Think of him on the subject of God and the kind of world God wants to see.  

Think of every widow, every orphan, every stranger in that town, and how he’d walk by, always waving two hands to say hello. 

…Always testifying to the love of God, who greets us with open arms and who wants so much to hear our voice.  

Amen.  

There was a troubling reminder of the sheer power of the air this week.  

A Boeing 777 from London and Singapore was somewhere over the Bay of Bengal when it hit a patch of extreme turbulence – apparently, a kind of turbulence that doesn’t show up on doppler radar and, therefore, cannot be predicted. 

You only know it when you’re in it, and you know that you are when the plane just drops 1000 feet in midair for no reason. 

This one dropped 6000 feet in three minutes, which I’m told is not long at all.  

However, it was long enough for one passenger to buy in-flight internet so he could then message his mother that he loved her, which he did. 

That’s very tender.  It’s kind of odd, too, if you think about the scene for a moment, but I don’t mean to take anything away from it—it’s tender.  

The turbulence lasted about five minutes…and 45 minutes later, the plane was able to make an emergency landing in Bangkok. 

20 passengers were taken to intensive care, and there was one fatality…which is terribly tragic, but also remarkably less of a tally than there might have been, had the pilots not been able to regain control of the plane.^[1]  

Of course, stories like this one just remind us just how tentative, and how unrelentingly partial our control truly is. 

If you think about it, so much of daily living requires more faith than we may want to admit. Faith in nature.  Faith in our fellow human beings.  Faith in our systems.

Is it faith, though, or something more like autopilot? 

The 18^th century English poet Thomas Gray is the one who penned the famous lines, “If ignorance is bliss, ‘tis folly to be wise.”  

Sometimes, that seems true enough.  

But Thomas Jefferson also had a point when he responded to Gray, noting, “If ignorance is bliss, why aren’t more people happy?”

Our Scripture this morning seems to wonder that, too.  

Admittedly, it’s not a tale of disaster narrowly averted—a Biblical version of The Poseidon Adventure or one of those Airport movies from the 70’s.  

But it is a story about people who are seemingly willing to look away and then other people who refuse to look away: who refuse to remain blissfully ignorant.  

Luke’s Gospel has more than one story about a person begging in a somewhat strategic location.  

Another one was the blind man begging outside the gates of Jericho, situated just at the point where pilgrims would have arrived safely.  

This one, we’re told, gets taken by someone each day to his spot just outside the Temple, surely in order to make the most of an excited visitor’s generosity at a moment of heightened religious emotion.  

For a man in his situation, it was as close to a sure thing as you could hope for.   

Yet like so many people Luke tells us about, the lame man was such a fixture there that he was almost invisible. 

In their own way, everyone who passed by was on autopilot.  

Who paused long enough to wonder how he got there each morning, or how he got back home? 

If he disappeared completely, who would have wondered where he’d gone? 

In that world, just likes ours, everyone had their problems, and he was someone else’s. 

And yet, according to Luke, when Peter and John approach the man, something different is at work.  

I want to be careful with my wind metaphors today, but a new breeze is blowing.  

At first, the man himself is scarcely paying attention. 

It seems that he’s also on autopilot.  

Another day, another dollar.  

He spots the two apostles and rattles his cup, hoping for a shekel or two.  

Really, though, he’s not even paying attention, not looking at them.  

The man doesn’t notice that the two apostles have stopped.  

And this is where it all turns.  

Luke reports that they “look straight at him,” (v.3) but that phrasing doesn’t capture it.  

The word in Greek is “atenizo” (pronounced: “atenidzo”). 

It’s a word that gets translated elsewhere as “earnestly beholding,” which sounds genuinely grand.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t really get at the meaning here, either. 

For Luke it’s more like having your eyes glued on someone.  

Because it’s the word Luke uses when Jesus says goodbye to the disciples and rises before their very eyes up to heaven, and they squint and stare up at the sky to try to see him until the last possible second. (22:56)

It’s the word that Luke would use a bit later to describe the death of Stephen, the first martyr, when he looks up “steadfastly into heaven” and sees the glory of God and the presence of Jesus at God’s right hand, which gives him the strength to die with dignity. (7:55)  

It’s the word Luke uses when the apostles preach and everyone who hears them becomes entirely focused, intensely present, knowing something is happening…knowing that what the apostles are saying can’t be explained as just “words” (even good words) because truth is always bigger than that.  

It’s a word Luke uses when someone is having an intense encounter with the living God.

And this is the point Luke wants to make.  

Peter and John look on the man outside the Temple gates, this semi-invisible man who seems as if he’s all but given up on any actual connection with someone, and who they see is Jesus.  

Just like they had when they were standing there squinting as Jesus went up into the sky, only now they’re standing there in front of the temple gates, squinting, and seeing Jesus in this man.  

Their eyes are glued on him. 

It seems hard to believe that they could have been on autopilot before, but in any case, they are absolutely paying attention now.  

And on the very spot where everybody else was walking by, blissfully ignorant, they stand convicted.   

No more autopilot for any of them.

It’s a hard lesson for us because it is so easy for us to try flying along on autopilot, too.  

Do you ever feel like you’re too busy, too preoccupied, too upset by all life’s turbulence to do much more than you’re doing, that you’re too focused on putting out fires to be more present…or have the bandwidth and the heart to look around…to make a point of noticing? 

It doesn’t take much for our eyes to be glued on all the things. 

So often, we’re afraid to look away.  

If we’re not careful, we can get so focused on the various ways in which we need saving that there isn’t room for anyone else aboard our raft. 

It’s really not that hard to fly.  

Unfortunately, a lot of people would rather just sit tight and curse the turbulence. 

This brings us back to Jefferson’s question: “If ignorance is bliss, then why aren’t more people happy?” 

We’re unhappy because we know.  We know this is not who or how we’re called to be. 

But as we see in so many ways right now, fear can have a powerful grip on us.  

It can teach us where to look and where not to, what to notice and what not to, when to stand up and when to walk by.    

If we’re not careful, even faith can become a form of bargaining.

We’ll do anything to stay on autopilot.  

And yet we know it isn’t really living.  

That’s why this morning’s Scripture is so important. 

Because into a world so easily terrified by the prospect of what seems like fate, God speaks words of possibility and life.  

The turbulence of the world is nothing compared to the peace and presence of God. 

We can learn to look for Jesus and to find joy in the turbulence of love taking over the world, even though we know that love never leaves anyone or anything the way it was before.  

It teaches the blind to see, and the lame to dance. 

Look closely. You can’t miss it.  

God’s fondest hope is that we won’t.

Amen.

^[1] Napat Kongsawad, “Sheer Terror” AP News, May 22, 2024. https://apnews.com/article/singapore-airlines-turbulence-bangkok-hospitalized-c3750c6b6f611acd771766b999d7468d

In a few minutes, we will invite our confirmands forward to make formal affirmations before us and so join the church as full members in their own right. 

If you have joined a church, and certainly this one, a bit later in life, you may remember that we Congregationalists do it with minimal fuss.  

It’s quicker than a baptism and really only takes a moment. 

For those who are welcoming a new member – for the audience, if you like – it offers a chance to put a face to a name, maybe read a little bit about them in the bulletin.  

We don’t often go into much depth around their spiritual journey and how it’s led them here.  

When I was growing up in Brooklyn, one of our neighborhood pizzerias got some new take out boxes that featured a cartoon guy throwing a pizza in the air.  “You’ve tried all the rest. Now try the best,” it said. 

Too often, churches can make joining sound sort of like that.

Of course, we know better. 

For some, coming to our church comes only after a long process of taking leave from another.  

Those of you who grew up Catholic will sometimes say things that are a little cryptic to those of us who didn’t, like “You can leave the Catholic church, but the Catholic church never leaves you.” 

But somehow, you have gone in search, anyway.  

Others find their way to our church, not because it’s different from another they once knew, but because, finally, this one seems to have something of the same powerful, joyful feel they remember —“you’ve tried all the rest,” after all – and this one feels like returning home.   

So while our words of welcome may be brief and the handshake may be quick, there is often a lot going on for people as they stand up to say their part and to receive that welcome.  

This is why Confirmation is so good for the church. 

It is a process of discovery and decision for young people.  

We are right to give that process the time and attention it needs. 

It asks something important of us that is not so easy for us to offer: it requires that we slow down and make a point to listen to their stories, recognizing them no longer as adorable moppets, but as fellow pilgrims, grown up seekers, people trying to make their way in a complicated world with God’s help.  

God willing, they remind us to see one another as fellow pilgrims, too, and to honor the searching and finding and searching that are the heartbeat of human life and the true vocation of being the church. 

As part of Confirmation, after a school year of Sunday evening classes and active church attendance, we ask our confirmands to prepare faith statements and urge them to be honest.  

It says something so powerful when you urge someone to be honest, and what they return to you is profoundly loving. 

So much of what our confirmands had to say was loving. 

As one wrote, “When others have talked about church as ‘a feeling of coming home,’ I never really understood what that meant until now. Church has given me so many memories throughout growing up. For example, every time I see the old attic on the top floor, I think of the life-sized Christmas puppets on stakes that used to be there, and the time my best friend and I were sent in as a sort of ritual hazing for Youth Group.” 

Wonderfully, they go on to explain, “This is what it means to have faith.  For me, having faith in God is like having faith that Bob Willett will always give me a big wave when he sees me.  It is like having faith that when you give a glass of water to one particular kid in Sunday School, he will one hundred percent spill it on himself and somehow on everyone else…It means you will always trust in a dependable source of good.” 

Another mentioned going to Pacific House with the church, and a moment when she saw a spontaneous act of kindness and connection between two people.  

They write: “This made me realize that God creates certain people with the goodness of His spirit, and those people pass it on to others, making the world a better place.  My ingrained wish to make the world safer and happier for those around me is actually a gift from God.  God wants us to create laughter and kindness in place of the hurt that exists in the world. I believe God wants the best for us, even if that means letting us face hardships…I can thank 2CC for letting me find myself through even the most awkward and hard parts of my life so far.” 

Another says, “In my opinion, worshipping God and sharing God’s love do not only happen at church.  They can take place when praying, donating, or whenever a person puts someone before themselves.”

Along with many of this year’s confirmands, they also have eyes to see that many forms of “public Christianity” do not reflect Christian commitment as they have come to understand it.  

They continue, “Christmas is not about the gifts. It is about Jesus’ birth.  Also, if a person wears a cross to look cool or as fashion, the cross loses its meaning.  It hurts me to know that someone is taking advantage of a sacred holiday or symbol and not understanding its meaning.” 

It says in the Book of Joshua, “Be strong and courageous.  Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged, for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go.” (Joshua 1:9)

Similarly, another quotes the famous words of Ecclesiastes 3, “to everything there is a season,” to talk about the way that God’s love and forgiveness abide through all of life’s ups and downs.   

“Jesus helps me solve problems that occur. He is the one I know will always listen to my problems, even when I feel I have no one else.  When I do something I realize is sinful, I reach out to him for forgiveness.”

That faith, they go on to say, “can change people’s entire personality or mindset.  It can turn some very bad people into new people, showing them forgiveness and hope.  It brings people together all around the world, spreading kindness and joy.  Without it, what would people believe in?  Who would they look to for guidance in life?” 

Another resonated with an important passage from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians.  

“Stay awake,” Paul writes. “Stand firm in your faith, be brave, be strong. Let all that you do be done in love.” (1 Co 16: 13-14)

This is a tall order, as the one who picked it clearly sees.  

On the standing firm side, they say, “It means proving to God that I can overcome adversity without being easily swayed. It does not mean that I cannot evolve in my beliefs, but rather that I will not base my faith in pleasing others.”

On the doing all things in love side, they say, “God gives us all love unconditionally, so it is most important for me to spread love to others and act with love in all I do.  God’s greatest trait is love, exemplified by gifting us with the ability to love.  When I act with love, I honor God’s most precious gift.” 

In another few moments, we will ask the people who have written these things to come forward and join us officially as members in their own right of our gathered community. 

The moment will not take long. 

But now you have a sense of just how much these five people are bringing into that moment, and into the church. 

They remind us, not only of how much they stand to offer us, but how much they stand to offer to world.  

For me, they underscore the importance of learning to spread love to others and to act with love in all that we do, with sincere commitment and humility of spirit.  

They remind us of what they have found here, and what it is our shared work to make sure that anyone…everyone…might find here – and to build from there.  

Our Scripture this morning describes the Day of Pentecost as the Spirit’s arrival with a sudden rush of wind, as God’s people discovered God working through them to gather all people into the Kingdom. 

The testimonies I’ve shared with you this morning suggest that the new voices and new understandings of Pentecost can also arrive slowly, with what we see and find so sudden to signify that something much deeper has been going on. 

As the novelist Anne Michaels writes, “Truth grows gradually in us, like a musician who plays a piece again and again until suddenly he hears it for the first time.”^[1]

May the truth of God’s great love continue to grow in these young people and in all of us, that we might hear it and respond, continually challenged and inspired.  

Amen.  

^[1] Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces, 251. 

Last week, in the run-up to Mother’s Day, the New York Times published a wonderful series of anecdotes from people remembering their “second mothers,” those wonderful alternate mother-figures some people are blessed to have in their lives.^[1]

Here’s one: 

Ruth lied to my parents. When she interviewed for the job of taking care of my four older siblings and me, she said she had lots of experience caring for children. Truth was, she’d never held a baby before in her life. She let me stay up late on Sunday nights, curled up next to her in an overstuffed chair, watching our favorite television shows. She let me “drive” her old green Ford, holding me on her lap while I steered. She taught me to make Norwegian wreath cookies and Swedish meatballs from scratch. She taught me that nobody is perfect. I experienced unconditional love and so did she. (Judith Shapiro, 73)

Another remembered: 

I come from a multicultural background, but the Puerto Rican side of the family lived far away. Alina, my best friend’s mom when I was in the third grade, taught me so much about my culture. Going to the store was a lesson in salsa music, visiting a theme park was a vocabulary lesson (“Fallon, ven aqui!”), taking a shower was a lesson in how to care for my hair and holidays were a lesson in large family gatherings and delicious food. All of these little things added up to a more full picture of my culture. Without Alina, I wouldn’t know a part of myself. (Fallon Alvarez, 35)

And this one was my favorite: 

My sister Rita was born six years before I was. If I had a nightmare and woke my mother up, she would tell me to climb into bed with Rita. I loved my mother, who was sweet but overwhelmed with raising four children while my dad worked long hours six days a week. Rita was always there, always loving. She introduced me to the library and cleaned me up when I was in second grade and had an upset stomach in the school bathroom. I was the maid of honor at her small wedding, and she was my matron of honor. Once, my fiancé and I were in a movie theater watching a comedy. After a few minutes, I leaned over to him and said, “My sister is here.” I could detect her laughter even in the crowded theater. (Harriet Liss, 83)

I love these stories. 

You can just picture the people they’re talking about—as you hear them, maybe they even bring up someone in your own life who played a similar role.

Most of us could probably do a better job at remembering and giving thanks for those people.  

Sometimes we don’t have even a single picture of them, which is particularly odd because, so many years later, we still feel their presence. 

Like the memories those people shared in the Times, we still remember the sound of someone’s laughter in a crowded theater…or how they taught us to take care of our hair…or what it was like to drive their old Ford. 

It makes me wonder what the disciples most remembered about Jesus.  

Scripture is careful to record the big things, right?  

Who could forget being on that boat in the hurricane with Jesus lying there asleep like a guy in a hammock under a palm tree?  

Or how he told them to feed all those people with five loaves and two fish, which they figured would only serve the first couple of rows…but they just kept watching as the baskets kept getting passed and passed and passed…and that day, everybody ate.  

Who could forget Easter? 

They wrote those stories down to make sure nobody ever would.  

But I wonder if really, there were other things, smaller and more personal memories, that made them especially feel his presence. 

The memory of his laughter, maybe. 

Maybe the particular way he broiled fish. 

How he could be tough in a debate with a grown up, and then turn and be utterly gentle with a kid.  

Make no mistake: the disciples staked their lives on following the things he taught.

But as is so often the case, the real source of transformation, the source of what the church has learned to describe as the new life in him, lay elsewhere. 

It came from knowing something of the way he was and coming in a million different ways to feel his presence.  

In his prayer for them in this morning’s Scripture, what he’s trying to say is that, even though everything between them is about to change, they will still feel that presence. 

It will be something far more true and far more real than just their memories, powerful as those memories are sure to be.  

Love is so much more than the memory of happy moments in a time gone by, or all those feelings that we used to have. 

Love teaches us to see the world and to understand ourselves differently, in ways that continue to shape us. 

It is not just who we become, but also how we become: it’s the engine of our becoming. 

Through all the changes that are part of any life, even a relatively quiet one, love stays with us.  

In all that lay ahead for them, they would still feel his presence. His love.  

Best of all, this would empower the disciples to be a new generation of second mothers, in their own way— miraculous people who came alongside others in the midst of very different lives in very different places, offering from their own abundant souls the fruits of unconditional love, self-knowledge, and recognition. 

They would change those lives forever by bringing Jesus there. 

And so it is for us. 

Each act of kindness or gesture of noticing is a form of grace – a gift that makes loving and being loved a bit more real for someone.  

Each one, in its own way, brings Jesus here and ushers in the Kingdom.  

Whenever that happens, if you listen, you can hear the sound of his joy.  

Amen. 

^[1] Catherine Pearson, “An Ode To Those Who Mother Us” NYT May 9, 2024. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/05/09/well/family/mothers-day-mom-figures.html?searchResultPosition=1

Dear Friends of Second Church,

This week, I’ve been reading a bit about L’Arche communities, a network of small houses throughout Europe and the Americas in which abled and physically handicapped/neurologically atypical people live together in Christian fellowship.  While most of the physical care is done by the abled, the emotional and spiritual care is shared by all, and the relationships are tremendously powerful and, at their best, profoundly holy.  

That’s not to say it’s easy.

As we all know, true community never is.  

Many of the handicapped members of these houses come to them only after difficult or even traumatic experiences in other institutions or in their own family homes, and learning to trust is a long process.  This means that quite often, the community is tasked (in the words of one volunteer) with “waiting for the beauty in each person” to emerge.  

I’ve been turning over that phrase in my mind for the last few days, thinking about how that is a good description of the work of churches, at our best.  

Not only do we see and celebrate the true beauty in people, but we are also prepared to wait alongside them as that beauty begins to emerge, however slowly that may be — as the grinding depletions and exhausting expectations of life’s challenges and past history have time and space to heal.  

We don’t always acknowledge how hard it can be to let our guard down.  

Sadly, some churches don’t offer a safe place in which to do so.   (Don’t get me started….)

But it’s a different sort of sadness to realize that the idea of doing so may not actually occur to many who do come.

And yet for some, admitting vulnerability has become so unthinkable that they don’t seek shelter for it among the gathered people of the church, kind as so many of those church people may seem.  Shelter isn’t even what many visitors come for, at least consciously.

We need to do better at making sure they find it, anyway. And quickly.

I can’t help but think how puzzled and relieved they would be to discover, first that shelter, and then the beauty within them that shelter can finally coax into view.  

With all that we offer and all that we wish we could, our primary task is to be a place where God’s love can do its thing.    

When it does, the lives that follow are beautiful, indeed.  

See you in church,

Believe it or not, it’s actually kind of difficult to learn much about modern shepherds from the Internet. 

Of course, that information must be out there, somewhere.  

I really tried.  

I really wanted to come in this morning and tell you about the blog I’d found – or the chat room where the shepherds all go to compare notes, but no such luck.  

If you Google “shepherd,” what you get is screen upon screen upon screen of sermons about the passage you just heard, and then screen upon screen of blog posts about pastors…particularly as written by pastors.  

As you might guess, this all goes south soon enough.

For example, I learned that there is a whole argument out there between Evangelical writers about whether a pastor is supposed to be a “shepherd,” or more like a “rancher.”  

And when I say it’s an “argument,” I mean it.

From what I could gather, a lot of people who went to seminary in the 90s were told they should strive to become ranchers.  

Management consultants apparently came in the schools to tell them this.    

But as one pastor responded, a “successful rancher is someone who checks out his flock from a helicopter via helicopter and satellite. He has hired hands, who actually handle the flock and its problems.”^[1]

Another made a point of the fact that the Bible has a few words for shepherd, but none that really correspond to rancher.  

Depending on how you read your Bible, that can be a real put away shot—and I got the feeling as I was reading it that the author most certainly thought it was.  

I didn’t really find any current spirited defenses of being a rancher, although I gather there must be some.  

Hold that thought for a minute.  

Now, shifting gears in order to come at shepherding another way, I did read, somewhere, that in 2005, a Turkish newspaper reported 1500 sheep had ran over a cliff, exhibiting a behavior known as “flocking.”  

You can probably guess what that is.  

When it happens, things can get pretty bad, pretty fast.  

Apparently, if even one sheep shows a little gumption or moves quickly for whatever reason, it can trigger this “flocking” instinct, even to the point of luring the others right over a cliff before anyone knows what’s happening.  

You’ll be glad to know that in the case of the Turkish sheep, only 450 of them died, because as it turned out, the ones on the bottom of the pile cushioned the fall for all the rest.  

I mention it because the danger of “flocking” might suggest why shepherds are so attentive to the ones that wander away.  

Maybe the problem isn’t just how vulnerable a sheep becomes if it wanders off alone and gets lost (though that’s true, too). 

The problem with a wayward sheep is also about how quickly and catastrophically everything can unspool if the others follow.  

When you put it that way, it sounds as if shepherds can’t drop their attention for a second.  

They can’t because the sheep sure won’t drop theirs… they won’t stop to figure out what’s happening…they won’t stop to ask who’s leading this charge… they won’t stop to google monthly wolf sighting statistics for their particular geo-location. 

They just react.  

Doesn’t it make you wonder about what it’s supposed to mean when Jesus refers to us as sheep? 

I always thought he was naming how he sees something lovely and innocent in us – and maybe he is.  

That’s part of what he sees in us. 

But all that notwithstanding, in calling us his sheep, I wonder if he isn’t also reminding us about just how powerful, and even dangerous, our reactivity can make us. 

At the drop of a hat, the snap of a twig, the glitter of something over there that happens to catch our eye, we can turn into a menace for ourselves and others, no matter how big or small the flock might be.  

That’s also part of what it means to be sheep.  

For one thing, this goes a long way to explaining why we need him. 

He’s not just a broad source of inspiration or even comfort, but the guide we need to listen and look for, particularly whenever we are overwhelmed.  

…Particularly when that may be hardest for us to do….

It may be that coming to believe in ourselves (in the best sense) is actually to learn not to trust ourselves entirely – we need to remember just how quickly we are capable of leading ourselves astray and taking others with us as we go. 

Instead, we need to take our cue from Him. 

Because the point is not just that we are sheep, but also that we’re his sheep.  

And this is where I can identify something worth taking away from my Internet research this week.  

Because the world seems to imagine God as a rancher, somewhere way up there, flying around in a helicopter, or vaguely following us by satellite. 

And what Jesus wants us to know is that he’s the shepherd. 

He’s down here at our level to handle us and our problems, even if and even when that means crawling through the muck to save us, most especially from ourselves and from our own worst instincts. 

The challenge for us to learn to listen for his voice, to wait for his guidance, to trust when we go astray that he is already coming in search for us…that he already knew we were missing even before we did. 

It’s a story that the Church tells after Easter, just as the disciples were first grappling with what it would mean to listen for Jesus in this new way, and to call the world to flock to him.  

It’s a lesson we might learn (or learn again) with every comment we soon realize that we were too quick to make, with every email we were too quick to send, every suspicion that were too quick to indulge, every bad report we were too quick to take at face value, every fear we were too quick to make into a wolf about to strike.  

We see the power of that pull away from what is lovely and innocent and kind and giving in us.  

We can’t entirely help it. 

But while we may be sheep, the point Jesus wants to make is that we’re his sheep.  

He’s calling to us…looking for us…crawling right into whatever brambles we’ve managed to get ourselves stuck in, working to bring us back to green pastures and still waters…to the places where all may safely graze. 

As the Psalmist says “Oh, that we might listen for his voice….”  

Amen.

^[1] R. Scott Clark, “Choose Your Metaphors Carefully,” The Heidelblog. https://heidelblog.net/2019/04/choose-your-metaphors-carefully-the-church-is-a-pasture-not-a-business/.

If you ask me, lately nature has become decidedly unnatural.  

We’ve been gearing up for the eclipse tomorrow (Monday).  I don’t know how much of it we’ll see here, but my understanding is that people from Texas to Maine will be able to see the whole thing, weather-permitting. 

Of course, if you were inclined to wonder just what the weather may or may not be inclined to permit right now, you would have cause to do so.  

In addition to the eclipse, I understand that there is snow in the forecast, and maybe a lot, for this coming week.  

Also, here in April, apparently 1 trillion cicadas are expected to hatch.  

That’s about 999.999 billion more cicadas than I need, myself.  

And on Friday, you’ll recall, we had that earthquake.  

Of course, for all the things that seem unnatural – suddenly unpredictable and foreboding – there are the consolations of other things which do not change.  

For example, I was troubled by the earthquake, especially when I thought it wasn’t an earthquake, but was the church boilers somehow all exploding at once. 

To be honest, when you put it that way, I was relieved that it was only an earthquake.  

But I was more relieved when I read that by midafternoon yesterday, a New York City store was already selling t-shirts that said, “I Survived The NYC Earthquake, April 5, 2024.” 

Don’t go changin’, oh my city.  Don’t go changin’.

In Scripture, of course, there are descriptions of earthquakes and eclipses and, for that matter, plagues of insects.  

Matthew and Luke’s Gospels talk about Good Friday with some references along those lines.  

When Jesus dies, Matthew reports that “the curtain of the Temple split from top to bottom.  And the earth shook, and rocks split, and tombs opened,” (27:51-52). 

According to Luke, as Jesus dies, “darkness fell on the whole earth…the sun’s light failed, and [again] the curtain of the temple’s inner shrine split in half,” (23:44-45).

All Creation seems to be proclaiming the Creator’s anguish and displeasure at the death of the Son, although soon enough, the weather conditions appear to have returned to their regularly scheduled program. 

Life went on. 

Most of the people were probably looking at one another, grinning a little sheepishly.  

“It was only an earthquake…”. 

“You know, for a second there, I thought it was…”

“Yeah. Me too. Me too.”  

Just what had changed and what had not were questions preempted by the return of nature’s regularly scheduled program. 

For us, too, it will not take long before a t-shirt may be the only memory we still have of all this unsettled and unsettling weather, and we’ll be able to shirk its questions just as seems the people on Good Friday did.  

What did you think was happening?  What seemed suddenly more precarious—less trustworthy—than you’d ever actually paused to consider before?  

What are the “’unsinkable’ Titanics” of our lives: those truths we hold that are just one iceberg away from a painful revelation that seems like it could send us to the bottom of the sea? 

All that aside, whom did you call first when it was over—who called you?  

There are many things we might ask and try to wrap our heads around. 

It’s all good now, and we don’t have to.  (Shrug.)

What if we didn’t shirk the questions? 

This is why I love The Gospel of John’s story about Thomas, the guy who is so famous for his doubting.  

John always sets his really good stories about doubts and questions at night, as if darkness could not help but make us yearn for light and clarity.  

At the beginning of his gospel, the story about Nicodemus is like that.  

So here, close to the end, night falls again, and with it, the questions return.  

We’ve learned to berate Thomas for his doubting—John suggests that even Jesus does. 

Personally, though, I see it as a blessing. 

It’s a blessing for anyone who decides that they cannot, will not shirk life’s questions, or simply swallow even faith’s most pious answers.  

Thomas is not resisting the good news because faith is unimportant to him, but precisely because it is.  

…Because it’s not enough to want something to be true, no matter how much you want it, or why, even if it’s for the best of reasons. 

Following the path that winds along through our fondest illusions is exceedingly hard to do; pretending that we don’t have to may be the fondest illusion of all.  

But not for Thomas, and God willing, not for us. 

The wonderful Irish Catholic theologian, Enda McDonagh, warns: “All believers are open to the temptation to domesticate God.”^[1]  

Yet, as he adds, “The unbelief which shatters our easy grip on a reduced God is the beginning of growth…Breakdown will occur.  But breakthrough is on offer.”

What is Easter, if not a story that begins with breakdown but continues along to breakthrough? 

The story of Thomas offers us this powerful example of someone earnestly seeking to live an Easter kind of life for themselves, even if doing so means risking both the power of his enemies and the displeasure of his friends.  

But the power of God – the lure of God – is just that strong.  

Thomas goes to a place where what is obvious and what is not come before him in a way that nobody else can really speak to, and it’s there that Jesus comes to meet him. 

Honesty says that we shouldn’t shirk life’s questions. 

Easter replies that we never have to, because even if it seems as if breakdown may loom, with God, it’s breakthrough that’s on offer.  

The earth may shake, the darkness may descend, there may be enough cicadas about to hatch so that each person on the face of earth can have their very own.

But the shattering of our illusions and our idols is the shattering of our shackles.

And the One that Thomas teaches us to call Our Lord and Our God is there to greet us, finally free. 

Amen.

^[1] Enda McDonagh, “Gospel and Culture,” in Between Chaos and New Creation, 28. 

Last fall, one of our sister churches in Ridgefield, the Ridgebury Congregational Church, did a curious thing. 

They found a small, secluded spot in a grove of trees on the church grounds, did a little bit of landscaping, and set up a box on a pole with an “old, cream-colored rotary phone.”^[1]

Did anybody else grow up with one of those?  

My grandmother’s was teal on the way to blue or blue on the way to teal. This is a matter of some debate for me and my cousins.

Can you picture it? 

Those phones always came with a long cord, right? 

If memory serves, the cord was long enough for a teenager to walk the receiver entirely out of the kitchen and mostly out of earshot so they could lean against the wall and transact all the social business of the day, however long that took and however many calls it might require. 

The cord was long enough for someone actually cooking in the kitchen to be on the phone while they moved around the room.  (Remember this? [MG crooks an imaginary phone])

If that sounds familiar, rest assured, this old, cream-colored rotary phone was properly equipped with just such a cord.  

The only thing it didn’t have was an actual connection to a telephone line.  

It’s what they call a “’wind phone,’ a disconnected phone that people can use to have one-way conversations with their loved ones who have died.” 

As the pastor of the church explained, it offers a way to “have the conversations that you didn’t get to have – the good, the bad, and the ugly.” 

Apparently, these phones are all across the world.  

The first one was set up in Japan in 2010, and there is a website, mywindphone.com, that lists all the places in the U.S. where you can find one.  

They offer a creative response to some powerful needs: our need to grieve and our bewilderment about how we’re supposed to do that; our need to feel a connection that survives, at least in the heart; our need to say the words we need to say whenever we finally find those words and the courage to speak them, and to say them without a sense futility that those words have arrived too late.  

Too late for what? 

Too late for a little more understanding, if not forgiveness? 

Too late, maybe, for anything to be different, or for a new chapter to begin for any of us?  

The hope that Christians find on Easter Sunday can be difficult to explain, and those who don’t believe can find its claims naïve and baffling.

But you don’t need to be Christian to understand Holy Saturday – the day when Jesus was gone, and in the language of the Apostles’ Creed, “he descended into hell.”  

Grief gives any of us a good enough sense of that.

From my own experience of grief, it is a mystery to me how the women Mark describes in his gospel are putting one foot in front of the other, much less where they find the strength to go see and touch Jesus’ broken body. 

Yet when there is nothing else we can do, there is comfort and meaning in receiving those we love into the rituals of our people, especially in tender moments of farewell.  

As Joe says to Pip in Great Expectations, “Pip, dear old chap, life is made of ever so many partings welded together…Diwisions among such must come and must be met as they come.” 

Now that it has come, the women rise to meet this moment of division in the prescribed ways.  

They go to the tomb to undertake the practices of goodbye on behalf of all those who loved him.  

As they walk to the tomb, surely they are formulating their own personal final words to him, the ones they must speak now or forever hold. 

Except that, suddenly, it becomes clear that something has happened.  

Something.  

In the moment, it is hard to say just what. 

The stone has been rolled back, and someone who is not supposed to be there, is, and the body that is supposed to be there, isn’t.  

The other gospels come into the church’s life a bit later, and they describe the scene in far great detail—filling in the blanks, to some extent. 

In John’s understanding, Jesus himself appears.  

In Matthew and Luke, the arrival of the other disciples and their astonishment get extended treatment, so much so that the initial experience of the women can almost seem like a prologue.  

Not so, in Mark. 

His version focuses mostly on the women and their a-ha moment of discovery, rather than on the parts that come later, such as telling the others, or the whole group’s astonishment, or the later encounters with the risen Jesus. 

Actually, I really appreciate that about Mark.  

He seems to understand that faith is not some sort of obvious thing—that’s it’s not just a simple marshalling of the evidence, as if anyone who had been there would have had to become a disciple if they’d seen what was happening, because duh.  

The way he tells it, these disciples see what they see, but they don’t know what’s happening. 

Something internal has to happen so they do.  

Certainly, they don’t get (yet) that the inevitability of death has been overthrown. 

They don’t get (yet) that a new way of life is being established. 

They don’t get (yet) that for those who find new life in Jesus, the promise of God’s healing will forever seek to respond to the breakage of injustice and sin.  

These are all things that the church would learn to say about Easter and becauseof Easter.   

Instead, because Mark’s account leaves room for something internal that has to happen within each of us, it may come the closest to offering us actual Easter.

It makes space and trusts God to use it.  

Because these things aren’t obvious. 

How could they be?  

And yet, for every person who crosses paths with a wind phone in some random churchyard and rolls their eyes, there’s somebody else – somebody who notices that phone and greets it with a laugh of recognition.

Almost in a dream, they pick up that heavy, old-school receiver, dial a phone number they haven’t thought of in years, walk the full scope of that long cord, plotz down on the ground, and speak themselves into a measure of peace.

Something internal happens.  

Faith’s understanding is that God comes into that space. 

No wonder, then that some spark of hope, some recognition of enduring connection catches up with them and fills that moment.  

The whole thing could not be less obvious and yet more real…more utterly true.   

Easter is like that.  

It’s a story about how God comes into the space of a lonely tomb and fills it with the power of new beginnings.  

It reminds us that the cords that bind us to life and to one another may be invisible, but they are unbreakable and far more than just our partings, welded together.    

Easter challenges us to start acting accordingly, most directly by making space for God’s healing and peace to touch all people and all things.  

In the days that followed that first Easter, the women who had visited the tomb would be filled, reminded, and challenged, too. 

Their own new beginning took shape as they came to find their voices and their Lord.  

As we celebrate Easter again this morning, may the same be said of us.  

Amen.  

^[1] The quotations about the wind phone are all from Meg Dalton, “Connected By Love,” on the Connecticut Public Radio website, October 6, 2023.