We begin in the middle of the conversation. Paul had visited Corinth, planted a church among this mixed group of gentiles, those who were formerly used to being firmly established in the middle of society and who were now beginning to understand what it means to stand alongside the outsider, and as one might expect problems arose. Scholars suggest that Paul wrote as many as four or five letters to the Corinthians, we have only two. So we join the conversation in the middle, Johnny come lately trying to make sense of what is going on within this conversation, within this community. Some of it makes us raise our eyebrows a little, man have they lost their way! Sexual immorality, eating food sacrificed to idols, power games, name dropping, etc.

They had begun with promise and wound up wandering in the wilderness. How to live this odd, promising, but strange life that held so much promise, but was, well different. It wasn’t how they were raised, it wasn’t how they had played the political games of society, it was, just very different. They were wandering in a wilderness of conflict, abuse, searching for a promise that had seemed so very evident when they first set out, when they left the safety of belonging and middle class life.

Last week we spoke about the trauma, loss and crisis that often precedes someone entering into a wilderness journey, but for some it is a promise, a promise that if you walk this path something really, truly wonderful will happen. It’s that moment, when you are out on a hike and you can see the top of ridge you are climbing and you finally surmount that ridge only to see that the trail curves and moves further uphill. It’s exhausting to realize that more is demanded, that you have not reached the top but only a way station and the pause that is a momentary enjoyment of rising all the way on top is delayed. Not. There. Yet. Uff.

The Corinthians began their journey with hope and dreams of wonderful things and found themselves embroiled in common conflict and disputes. If you spend much time talking to unchurched people at some point you will hear someone say, “Oh those churches, they say they are good, kind, loving Christians, but they are filled with conflict and power games and lot’s of shoulds, “it should be this way,” “you should dress like me” “you should, you should, you should” it’s no different than anything else.” There is a Buddhist saying that, ‘before enlightenment one chops wood and carries water, after enlightenment, one chops wood and carries water.” It reminds us that our daily tasks and the events of our lives do not change much. We still have the same labors, the same weather, the same bills and live with the same people, whether we are Christian or not. We will still wander the badlands of life at some point, times of conflict, loss, trauma, these will come the rain falling on the good and the bad alike.

So we meet Paul in what scholars believe is his fourth letter to this conflicted congregation. He speaks to reassure them and to help them stay the course, to keep on track, to remember to make the most important things first and foremost, not letting them drown in the sea of so many small things that tend to fill our lives. In today’s passage Paul points them to the beauty that lives within us, that passes by unseen and unnoticed every single day.

“Remember who you are, he says, remember what great beauty lies within you, for you were made to shine, you were created in the image of the most high God. You are wondrous. Remember who you are.”

He says this even though the conflict is only in an ebb and soon flows again. It’s one of those things you can’t say to someone in the heat of the moment, but something that we need to hear again and again during those quiet times. “Remember who loves you. Remember how wonderful you and those around you are.” He reminds us how important it is to really see one another, to remember why we are engaged in relationship in the first place, that we are all part of the body of Christ. He reminds us how important it is to see beyond what is happening in the moment or outward appearances and look beneath, to look for the image of Christ, the light of God, shining in each person we meet.

There are two stories that came to mind as I studied this scripture, and I’d like to share them. One comes from the book, “The Half Has Never Been Told” and it’s the story of Liza Jane. Liza Jane was a young girl who was sold away from her family, sold down the river, and arrived at the plantation beaten, brutalized, and dissociating. She was almost zombie-like, moving through the day more dead than alive she did the bare minimum to avoid the attention of the overseer. The story that was passed down, that comes to us now, is how the men and women in the field, working alongside Liza Jane would sing to her, ‘Come on home, Liza Jane, come on home” and as the days passed it woke something in her, and she began to sing back to them, “I’m coming home, I’m coming home.” They sang her back to life when she was lost in despair. They refused to give up on her and just kept singing.

The other story is the story of Dr. Ted Stoddard. His fifth grade teacher relates how he came to be in her class. She had noticed him the year before on the playground and he wasn’t the kind of student she looked forward to teaching. He was disheveled and needed a bath, he was quiet and withdrawn and when he did engage in class activities his behavior was odd and put the other students off. He would blurt out inappropriate things and his actions were simply discordant, unsettling. When she sat down to review the students class histories she read his last. She didn’t want to be prejudiced, but he just rubbed her wrong.

As she read his former teacher’s notes she was surprised and shocked. The first grade teacher said he was a delight and charming. The second grade teacher described him as bright and sociable, a quick learner. The third grade teacher said his year had begun well enough, but his mother’s illness was clearly taking a toll on him. His fourth grade teacher said he was withdrawn and tended to isolate, he seemed distracted and had difficulty learning, the teacher speculated that the death of the young boy’s mother was the cause of this change.

She put the papers down and prayed for the young boy, and herself. She told herself she would give him extra attention and a little more care. Still, she felt ashamed of her quick judgment.

When Christmas came and the students brought little gifts this boy brought a half used bottle of perfume, clumsily wrapped, sort of disheveled not unlike the boy. She thanked him and made a big deal of putting some perfume on. When the day ended she wished her students a good Christmas break and said goodbye to them, only to notice this young boy lingering. “You smell like my mom,” he said, and then he left.

She began to see him with new eyes, eyes that looked for the treasure hidden beneath the depths of his grief, his loss, his pain. We are called to the very same mission, to see each other through the eyes of Christ, to look with love and to believe the very best in each other especially when it’s hard.

Paul spoke to a church that was in the middle of it’s own wilderness journey, one that was trying really hard to figure out how to live this new life in Christ and who sometimes just wanted a charismatic leader to tell them what to do. To these people, Paul said, “remember who you are, remember that we have this treasure in clay jars, not in fancy, gilded jars, or shining crystal, but in common clay, chipped and broken, yet within each one is a treasure.” He asked us to look beneath the surface and search out the image of Christ, the light of God, in each person, not to sit in judgment, not even positive judgment, but to put our hope, our trust in the image of God shining from each person.

Things may be hard, they may be difficult, we may wander in the desert, not sure if we are heading in the right direction, or even the same direction, but we remember who we are and whose we are. We have this invitation to pause in our travels and notice the beauty, the grace, the love, the kindness, all around us, and to find, even in, especially in, our most difficult circumstances cause for gratitude.

 ^“So we do not lose heart. Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day. ¹⁷ For this slight momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure, ¹⁸ because we look not at what can be seen but at what cannot be seen; for what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal.”

We have this ministry, to see in each other the treasure buried beneath the clay, beneath all that life heaps upon us. To sing each other back to life when we are lost and in pain. To see with the eyes of Christ that we might love like Christ. May it be so.

Beginning in Brokenness

There’s a lovely quote that’s become quite popular, “We all have baggage, find someone who loves you enough to help you unpack.”

We love to hear stories of people traversing their own desert, their wilderness times. It gives us courage and inspires us to hear how they have overcome, but few of us enter a wilderness or desert experience on our own. It is in our nature to have a certain inertia about us, getting up off the couch, taking that first step, can be the hardest thing to do, and often we don’t do it until something forces our hand, grabs us by the heart strings and says “Come!”

Joseph Campbell, the great student of myth and archetype, reminds us that the hero’s journey always begins with conflict, with tragedy. We do not get to rise up one morning and proudly proclaim, “Look what I have overcome!” without having faced great difficulties. Yet we hesitate because we know that sometimes, especially in our greatest fears, sometimes great difficulties break us, and we fear that brokenness more than anything.

So it often comes as a brutal surprise, these events that send us off into the wilderness. Something happens, a diagnosis, a death, loss of a job or a home, and we find that we suddenly don’t know where we are, sometimes we don’t know who we are. We might stare at our reflection in disbelief, as if someone else was staring back at us. It’s one of the reasons we fight so hard to defend beliefs that we have long held, or sacrificed a great deal for. We don’t want to be wrong. We don’t want to see our frailty, our fallibility. We don’t want to see how easily we hurt one another.

How often do we begin a relationship with promises that we will never hurt one another? Yet we do. We fail to live up to the very best that we can be, that we want to be, and our failure to do this insists on a response from us. We are asked to move into our own wilderness journey and face the shadowy, hidden parts of ourselves and this can be very frightening.

Someone once told me that the mark of a healthy community is that when someone is brave enough to  say, “I have all this baggage, these wounds, these regrets and failures that I carry around with me,” the response is, “Me too.” Calvin spoke about this as ‘total depravity’ meaning that nothing, no one, no part of us, escapes being flawed in some way. No one can firmly stand on their feet and say “I don’t need help, I can do it ALL on my own. I don’t need you. I don’t need my community. I don’t need God,” that if we are willing to look deeply at our own flawed nature we all know that we do, in fact need help. We can’t do it all alone and this feels very vulnerable. It’s part of our American culture that we ought to be able to stand on our own feet and do it ourselves! Man up! Cowgirl up!

Our liturgical tradition insists that every year we pause and encounter our mortality, our frailty, our fallibility and acknowledge our deep need for God. As the poet Hafiz said centuries ago,

“Don’t surrender your loneliness so quickly.
Let it cut more deep.

Let it ferment and season you
As few human or even divine ingredients can.

Something missing in my heart tonight
Has made my eyes so soft,
My voice so tender,

My need of God
Absolutely
Clear.”

Today,

Some of you might be wondering when I’m going to get to the scripture, because this is an unusual story. It’s not a part of our lectionary at all. Like most of the dark stories in our past we prefer not to talk about it. Noah lets us down. He was supposed to be a good guy! He was supposed to have insight and courage, steadfastness and to be the one who came riding in, well not on a white horse, but on his great ark, and saved the world as we know it. He was the one who stood up to all the ridicule of his neighbors, who followed God faithfully even when he didn’t fully understand. He was the one who stood on the deck of the ark and wept as the full horror of the flood hit his hometown and devastated it.

I don’t know about you, but I hate it when my heroes fail. I like them bright and shiny and untarnished. I don’t want to know that Lot offered his daughters to a gang who pounded on his door, if they would only stop threatening his guests. I don’t want to think about the fact that Bathsheba really had no choice but to accept the advances of King David. I don’t want to think about the failures of those who shaped and formed our faith. I don’t want to think about the failures of those who shaped and formed my family’s history, or our country’s history, or..well, you get the idea.

But if I am to walk my faith journey with integrity and honor, I must be brave enough to look at the hidden, shameful aspects of our history, of my history. And if I am wise, I’ll do that before some tragedy forces me off the couch and insists I walk the path through the valley.

Lent is that season that invites us to walk this path, to be reflective, to look deeply at who we are, who we want to be, and see how the two diverge. It is grace that our faith takes us through this process every year. Pause, look, reflect, remember you are mortal.

Our character is uniquely known and formed by those choices we make when pain and loss push us into our own desert, our wilderness experiences. When we find ourselves lost and unable to recognize ourselves, can’t find our way, when difficult emotions have narrowed our focus down until we feel lost in them. We don’t talk much about Noah’s trauma or his drunkenness. We don’t talk much about his hung over behavior and his shame filled cursing of his grandson. That isn’t the Noah we are comfortable with. But it shapes him, it tells us who he is, and for all those long years afterwards he lives with the consequences of having discovered within himself, that which he wants to deny, to forget.

We have such a tendency to deny our brokenness to want to be shiny and bright all the time. But we are not created to stay that way. Our lives are full of conflict and change, each change bringing with it the loss of what was. We have this inertia, this struggle to leave what is comfortable and familiar and sometimes we need the comfortable and familiar, we need to wrap ourselves in what we know will feel good and be healed, but we were never meant to stay in those places.

Our failure to look at the brokenness and darkness within us allows it to come into our lives when we are least prepared. We might hear ourselves saying something racist or demeaning to others and be surprised that we said that. We might, in a moment of stress react in ways that bring harm or pain to those we love, snapping or hitting when we really needed to stop and breathe, to stop and know that it is going to be okay, we are safe in God’s hands, we have survived worse, don’t be afraid, it’s going to be okay…but it takes practice to be able to hit that reset button, that pause, in the middle of stressful moments.

I feel for Noah in this text. He has witnessed so much death and loss. All of his friends and neighbors, gone; the market he used to walk through, gone. I find myself wondering what he witnessed when he disembarked from the ark. When I was a child and I heard the story of the flood in Sunday School the pictures that went along with it were always beautiful, full of rainbows and fresh green grass, birds singing, but now, as an adult, I wonder if it wasn’t more like the aftermath of Katrina. Just as I feel so much for Lot’s wife, who heard the destruction of her town behind her as they walked away, who lost her best friends and her aunties and her neighbors, the kids she used to watch for a friend, the gardens she tended, how could she not look back? And be consumed in tears, be swallowed up in mourning and loss? A pillar of salty, crying tears, I’m sure that was an accurate description.

Noah tries to do the right thing when he gets off the ark. He turns his attention to rebuilding to reestablishing what was lost, the gardens, the vineyards. He seeks some sense of normalcy and when it is all done, he has a glass of wine, or a bottle or two. So much pain to numb out and he had tried so hard for so long to be strong, to be in control, to set the good example, and how deep his shame must have been when he is discovered, exposed, frail, small, just a man. In his shame and his anger he curses his son and his grandchild, and I do not want to judge him, but only to note that had he been able to take that second breath, to pause for a moment and remember who he wants to be, he might have done better.

And I want to note too that God continues to bless Canaan and all this descendents. Yes, Noah set brother against brother, but the Canaanites still live, still prosper, still thrive.

Pain that is not transformed, is transmitted, especially during times of stress, pain, and loss. When we find ourselves acting in ways that betray our deepest values, our cherished beliefs, it is then that we are invited to walk a desert path, encounter God in the wilderness and transform our pain, that our lives might be transformed, that we might live healthy, whole, and abundant lives. Welcome then to the wilderness,

sssssdds

Peace,

Cyndi Wunder

may the Spirit of God surprise you today!

Earlier this week I wrote the pastoral letter for the newsletter, I know you haven’t seen it yet, but I wrote it in the midst of that lovely, unseasonably warm weather we were having. It was as if we were being given a glimpse of what’s to come, and sometimes we really need that glimpse, that promise, so we have something to hold onto when things get hard again. We all knew that the unseasonably warm weather wasn’t going to last. I have friends in warmer climes who were posting pictures of cherry trees in bloom, others sharing pictures from beachside vacations, but even if we had this moment of glory, we all knew that we had several more weeks of cold, of mud, of rain, not even the glittering, crystalline images of winter, but the muddy inbetween of not quite spring.

So as I began to struggle with this scripture and how it relates to us, to our time, to current events and how it might be calling us out, or offering reassurance when we most desperately need it, all of this came to mind. The disciples had only recently named Jesus as the messiah, to which he had responded, “you know, that means I’m going to die. Horribly.” Peter immediately said, no! it can’t be! Jesus rebukes him, ‘get behind me Satan.” A little harsh I think, but it did get the point across. Don’t tempt me. If you follow the story you know that Satan has already tempted Jesus with the whole, “be a winner! Make Jerusalem great again!” motif. You can be the next King David! You can have hundreds of wives, dance in the streets, never lose a battle. You can be a winner! Jesus denies him. And when Peter wants to offer the same, ‘but you can’t die, you’re a winner! You’re going to save us all! Restore the kingdom, make everything great again!” narrative, Jesus denies him too.

Poor Peter, it must have been so confusing! Jesus was, by all accounts, really charismatic and powerful, clearly a healer, certainly a leader, wiser than anyone who tries to trip him up, but then he says, “well, you know I’m going to die, like a criminal, totally abject, painful, shameful death.” Of course Peter and the other disciples, let’s not pick on Peter alone, were astonished at this statement. It was unbelievable.

So Jesus invites them on a hike. Just take a walk with me up this mountain. That should have been a warning sign, I suppose. Mountain tops have a reputation in Hebrew scripture; God seems to hang out there often. Perhaps the disciples should have had some awareness of what was to come, but who really is ready for dead men, missing men, or God to appear? Who is ready to see their beloved friend transform into someone glowing and holy?

Now this is one of those scriptures that people want to see as both metaphorical and historically true. We want to see Moses and Elijah showing up as metaphorical symbols of the law and the prophets brought together in Jesus Christ, as the living, Elijah never did die, he was taken to heaven in a flying chariot, and the dead, Moses died and was buried, brought together in Christ. And we want to believe that Jesus was literally transformed, glowing and bright, before the disciples in actual fact. That he ends this episode by telling them to “tell no one” as he often does, doesn’t make it easier for us to discern how much of what we hear and see in this scripture is actual or metaphorical. It is one of those texts that asks us, do you want the facts, or the truth? And we are reminded that the truth of God with us is larger and more fantastic than any literal story could ever contain. God with us, God of God, Very God, is just too amazing to understand. “No one can look upon God and live” but…here we see God, God revealed in the person of Jesus Christ, God in the overshadowing cloud, God in the thundering voice. God is present and we and the disciples, live to tell the tale.

God, however, is always present, is always showing up in small and fleeting ways. We are called not only to see God when God manifests in glory, rippling, radiant robes, and shining face, but in all the small and passing ways. The worshipful song of a bird, lost in the trees overhead, the glistening ice coating the tree limbs stretched high above the plains, the dancing electric lines on the telephone poles, whipping back and forth, up and down, God is all around us and so often we miss it. We miss those subtle appearances but this one time, taking the disciples up the mountain God decides to make a big showing up, a great showing forth. And the disciples are appropriately stunned. They want to set up house and stay there, far away from the maddening crowd, from the sick and the needy, but God takes them back down the hill. God insists there be no setting up of permanent shelters, but sends them back into the fray.

God who loves us more than life itself, who gave up life, liberty all of that, for us, that we might live free, full and abundant lives, tells us we cannot stay on the mountain. Oh, we might need to see the mountain, to see the glory of God made large and manifest, because we are so very slow at seeing it in the light shining from the newborn baby calf’s eye, the glittering ice covering our electric lines, the wind whipping through the plains, the delicate destruction of moss or fungi recycling crude fixtures once again. Because we resist seeing God in the midst of all these natural processes and want to see God only in the glory of the moment, all shining and bright, full of glittering gold and power, but God, very God, comes to us in the fallen, the weak, the vulnerable, in the unfortunate and the untimely and it takes practice to see that. It’s not that we can’t, we can and we do, but it takes practice and faith to stop and see God there. Some part of us longs to see God triumphant, conquering, forcing God’s will, shape and form on the world! Ta-da! But God, very God, as we meet in Jesus, resists this temptation and insists on a more vulnerable, tender, and loving way. God, very God, refuses to force God’s self upon us or upon anyone or anything. And God triumphant, leading a chain of the conquered behind him as any conqueror would have done in ancient Roman times, simply refuses to show up.

God is not interested in conquering anyone or anything. God who might shine like love incarnate, more powerful and tender than we can begin to imagine, refuses to be the conquering hero. This moment, on the mountain, with God’s very glory exposed, is a tender moment, shattered by the crude and misunderstanding statements of one who just doesn’t get it, just like we fail to get it so often.

The glory of God shines all around us, tender and full of the most mighty transcendent power, and all too often we fail to get it, because we are looking for something else, someone else, that mighty conquering hero God who will put to shame all who have ever hurt us, and God sees the offer, and refuses it. God sees our invitation to be the conquering hero, to be the triumphant ruler, and refuses it. Yes, God can shine in glory and power. Yes, God is powerful and omniscient beyond our ability to understand, and no God does not use who and what God is over and against us but always for us and even those who have hurt us, who we see as our enemies.

Over the next few weeks as we make that walk towards Golgotha, Christ reminds us that there is more coming. That no matter how dark the valley we are walking through, there is another side. God shows up in so many ways to remind us that no matter how dark or difficult the times may be, there is a bright future ahead, a time of glory. We have this resurrection faith that insists that not even death will have the final word. God tells us that God is here in all the small things, in all of the small graces, seeping into our lives like sea water into the sand, firming everything up. Our invitation is find all those places where God is seeping into our lives, holding us together with love and kindness. May it be so.

So, part way through my sermon I almost tripped off the edge of the chancel, and that is why there is a quick outburst of laughter in the middle.

Arriving at the end of Jesus’ sermon on the mount we are left with a new way of being in the world. One which gives preference to peace and reconciliation even before seeking God’s favor, even before seeking to reconcile with God, reconcile with your neighbor, with your sibling, with the stranger among us. The law, especially as we find it in Leviticus, focuses a great deal on one’s personal cleanliness, one’s personal righteousness, but Jesus redirects us to the communal nature of the law. He says the law and even our faith exists for the other.

The dilema that a Jew of Jesus’ time might have struggled with would have been how can I help the other, the poor, the downtrodden, the unclean if I am to remain clean, pure, and holy? How can I lift up the stranger, beaten and left in a ditch, if I am to remain clean and holy and touching him, interacting with him, would contaminate me, make me unclean. Again and again we hear Jesus confront the Pharisees, these good, godly, church-going people like us, as he tells them that their personal salvation involves losing their ritual cleanliness and purity for the other. Again and again he transgresses the purity laws to reach out to the most despised, the most lost, the unclean, the unholy, the forgotten, the dismissed.

If the pharisees of his day valued personal righteousness and purity over charity to others, what are our idols? We get to ask ourselves is, if the Pharisees of that day were so concerned with their ritual cleanliness that they struggled to reach out to the least of these, what keeps us from doing it?

Those good religious people in Jesus’ audience might have expected him to instruct them on how to be better at following and maintaining the law, at adhereing to what already was. Just be better, work harder, you can do it! but Jesus flips everything once again, be pure? No, be kind and meek, be righteous? Better to be a peacemake and seek reconciliation with those who have wronged you. Forgo any righteous attempt at retaliation or vengeance, Jesus tells us, instead reconcile.

In 2008 Julio Diaz showed us what this looks like. Julio was a 31 year old social worker living in New York city and he had a pretty simple daily routine. On his way home he would get off the subway one stop early and go to his favorite diner to eat dinner. But one night in April of that year his routine was disrupted by an angry young man with a knife who approached him as he got off the subway and demanded his wallet.

Now, in our storybook world of what is right and wrong, this is the place where a superhero should have shown up, knocked that kid on his backside and righted that wrong. An eye for an eye, right? Justice, right? But that’s not what happened.

As this youth was walking away Julio was struck by how small and fragile he looked, one young teenage boy against the world and he called out to him, “Hey, if you’re going to be out robbing people all night, you ought to take my coat too. It’s going to get cold tonight.” And the boy turned surprised. “I wasn’t going to do anything tonight anyway,” Julio explains, “just going to get dinner at the diner and head home. You can join me if you want.”

Warily the teenager decides to join him and they eat at Julio’s favorite diner. This youth watches as Julio greets everyone by name, as he chats with the server, says hello to the dishwasher. “You know everyone here. Do you own this place?” he asks.

“No,” Julio responds, “It’s just my favorite diner. I come here all the time.”

“But you’re nice to everyone, even the dishwasher.” Puzzled, intrigued, he just had to ask.

“Didn’t anyone ever tell you to be nice to everyone?” Julio returns.

“Yes, but I didn’t think anyone really lived like that.” The youth says and the story of his anger, his pain, his hopelessness begins to unfold.

Julio looked beyond the outrageous behavior of this young man and saw a brother, a neighbor, a hurting child. His response is not a trick, not a manipulation. No one is more wary of being sold a false bill of goods that our younger generation. We promise them a loving, gracious, Christ centered community and they notice when we fail to live up to it. Their pain is prophetic. It calls us to return every time we slip up, every time we move away from the path Jesus has laid out for us.

We have been called to be the light of the world, to join Julio in taking risks and reaching out to those acting out in pain, grief, and frustration. Blessed are the peacemakers, if you even think ill of another you are liable to the punishment, do not resist evil but respond with love and grace.

Jesus calls us to a different paradigm, one where we love one another so much we commit to holding the tension between difficult choices. One where we commit to both/and solutions and refuse to give up or force our solution on others. We are called to refuse any invitation to belittle others or demonize them, to see in them the image of God especially when we don’t understand.

When we hold these two scriptures in tension this morning we avoid the desire to push an agenda. The Leviticus scripture seems to speak so eloquently to our day and the issues we are facing, but when we hold it in tension with the semon on the mount we know we are called to deeper dialogue than, “I’m right, you’re wrong, scripture says so.” We are called to listen deeply to those we disagree with until we can hear and understand the issues that are driving their choices, we must listen with our hearts. We must listen with our hearts to every cry of anger and frustration until we can hear every fear, grief, loss, or cry of despair that lies underneath it. and we must seek to reconcile over and over again, and impossible number of times, promising to those we love and to those we don’t even understand, that we won’t abandon them or dismiss them, that they matter and we will continue to seek to understand.

Julio could have fought that youth. We would have applauded his bravery. He could have called the police and had him arrested. We would applaude his holding the young man accountable. He could have organized a neighborhood watch to keep an eye out for such young men and we would applaud his community service, but he didn’t. He opened his heart to him, saw him with compassion and gentleness as if it were his little brother making bad choices and he called out to him. Julio never says it was his faith that caused him to offer his jacket to this boy, but we know he is Christian by his love—isn’t that what we are trying to accomplish? That the whole world would know we are Christian because we walk the path of Jesus Christ.

This weekend at Presbytery we all listened as a woman spoke about a new component to their church life. How it was that this small church heard about migrant farm workers and dairy workers and reached out to them, how the local dairy, who employed so many of these recent immigrants said to them, “You are first in recent memory to reach to our workers.” How it hurt their heart to hear that no one had said to all these people, “You are a child of God,” “You matter!” “We care about you!” and now the entire congregation gathers to learn Spanish, to sing in Spanish, to worship in both English and Spanish as their lives have been enriched and their hearts filled with love for the neighbors they had simply overlooked for years.

She shared another story that touched my heart, one I can’t hear without imaginging tears streaming down this man’s face. She said that they had decided to celeberate the Dia de los Muertes, and one young man, a man in his mid -40’s, said through a translator that he had never been able to memorialize his father. He placed his father’s picture on the altar and talked about having been far from home when his father died and that he had no community with which to mourn, to grieve, to honor the gifts his father had given him, the loss he felt. Until now.

Who are the invisible and unseen among us? Who are we called to reach out, to uplift, to call to, “Hey, you need a coat, it’s going to get cold.” “Hey you! You can come to our church. You can come and worship with us.” “Your presence would bless us in ways we can only begin to imagine!”

We are called to a radical, gracious love that will take us places we never thought we would go, that will enrich our lives beyond anything we can imagine. To be brave and to be bold and to be present. We are called to hold that tension when we have disagreements. To hold it with the promise that I will not abandon you, I will not walk away, I will not silence you, because you matter too much. To hold that tension, creativily and let it work in us and change us and transform us, and take us some place new. May be it be so.